VAPERS

Well, Antonella Dalla Torre’s Italian 202 class had its first annual La Mattina degli Oscar (The Morning of the Oscars), and it was quite a special event. Good food, everyone well-dressed, and the culture was first rate, now that’s Italian! The occasion was a celebration of the recent work this class put into creating a series of pretty impressive Italian Mashups for their final projects.

The rules of the game were pretty simple:

• Each group had to use freely available, public domain clips from the Internet Archive to create a narrative.
• They had to write the script in Italian and get it approved.
• They were expected to perform the dialogs with passion.
• Finally, they needed to subtitle the entire film in Italian (most of which range from 2 to 3 minutes long)

The project seemed like a really fun experiment from what I could tell of the classes overall reaction this morning. There was a lot of laughter and kidding once the films were finally screened. Which is a good thing given the tight deadlines and intense collaborative work forced upon the students over a two week span at the end of the semester. I have to hand it to the class as a whole, they met the challenge with gusto. And I particularly have to hand it to Antonella for following and engaging so many of the conversations in regards to teaching and learning in our current moment (some of which happen in her dining room!) and framing out an impressive, pointed, and very powerful example of coalescing various media, languages, and cultures to give rise to some extremely fun and challenging projects. Bravo!

Below are scanned versions of the official “Oscar cards” for each of the five major categories which are followed by the actual mashups: 1) Best Film, 2) Best dialog, 3) Most creative, 4) Best Special Effects, and 5) Best soundtrack/music. (The Oscar cards featured below were designed by Michele Fontefrancesco.)

You can also see higher-quality versions on the class project blog “Il Mashup.”

Alien Pizza (Best Italian Film)

Maria! Maria! (Best dialog)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUEdSB8fO1c

Libidine e disonesta (Most creative film)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVNCr4B0Gfw

La specie femmina (Best Special Effects)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOoz5znR0y0

La storia di Giovanna (Best use of music)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZFuaUTrgc

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I just came across this beautiful, nutty video mashup on Sean Comerford’s blog titled “Alien Pizza.” Sean was in Carole Garmon’s Video Art seminar last semester and did some pretty amazing videos. This semester he is taking Italian 202 with the ever wonderful Antonella Dalla Torre who has introduced a final assignment that asks the class to take videos from the Internet Archive and mash them up into a two to three minute clip that creates a narrative featuring Italian dialogs they perform and record separately then dub onto the movies. Each of the mashups will also be subtitled with those dialogs in Italian so that the project incorporates both the oral and the written elements of the language.

They just started the project on Monday, and from my brief time in the class today, they all seemed very excited about the possibilities afforded by the fusion of the Internet Archive and their unbounded imaginations. Sean is working with two others on the project, and I think “Alien Pizza” is just a mashup test run they threw together without the dubbed dialogs and/or voice over. I’m not sure if Sean is the sole author of this video, but I’ll try and clarify that shortly.

In the meantime, however, be sure to check out the thrilling results —I personally find them astounding. What I find so remarkable is that a mashup project like this demands focused attention not only to the details of the particular linguistic components of the assignment (oral, written, grammatical, etc.), but also to a more abstracted creativity, playful collage, and a strong command of both musical and visual narrative to achieve the desired effect. Integrating all these elements together seamlessly looks far easier than it really is, and making it look easy is often the tell tale sign of a carefully crafted narrative. Alien Pizza hits the mark on all these points, and must have been as fun to make as it is for me to watch. Enjoy a far out slice!

Download Alien Pizza

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I stopped using Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin a while back when I started playing in earnest with WPMu. Reason being is that this plugin didn’t really work well with WPMu last year at this time, and Anarchy Media Player was, and still is in many regards, alternative media player of choice for WPMu. However, I saw some yet undisclosed things today via Andy “I am video” Rush using the Viper’s Quick tags’ FLV player that made me want to test this plugin once again for WPMu 1.3.3. So I did, and guess what it? It worked fine, it even gave the YouTube, Google, and FLV icons in the visual editor, which was a long-standing issue as far as I could tell from the forums. So, I don;t think we will be getting rid of the Anarchy media Player anytime soon, but we may just have that many more options for playing media on UWM Blogs, but not until Mr. Rush blogs his findings (c’mon Andy!).

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I just got back this morning from a 36 hour marathon trip to NYC. This uncharacteristically short trip was instigated by a workshop I got invited to do at Brooklyn College (which was a lot of fun), but the larger reason for this post is, of course, the wonderful, beautiful city of New York. So below you’ll find the tale of the tape of my journey (along with a map), highlighting just how much goodness you can pack into a day and a half if you don’t sleep

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Thursday April 10th, 10:00-10:35 pm
Soundtrack: Arrived at Penn Station, ate my first and only dirty water dog, then headed to the subway to catch the F train to the lower Lower East Side. All the time with Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (a new favorite) exclusively on the head phones, which during the trip was pared down to just the second part of the “Trilogy” (a.k.a Hyperstation) from Daydream Nation) and “Self Obsessed and Sexxee” from Experimental Jet Set. The Sonic Youth soundtrack was key to the tenor and energy of this trip, mind you.

Thursday April 10th, 10:35 pm-12:30 am
Met good friend Matt Gold at the Delancy Street subway station and together we head for the first of two amazing NYC pizza experiences. This one was at Bella’s Oven on the Lower East Side, and I won’t go into all the details because Ed Levine does an excellent job describing the food, the place, and the delicious pizza quite well in this post over at Slice, a great NYC pizza blog recommended by Matt. We actually split two large pies, our first a Diavolo (with hot salumi) and the second a straight, old gold margarita. Delicious food and great conversation about all things EdTech, academia, and New York City.

Friday, April 11th, 12:30-3:00 am
Headed back to Matt’s apartment and caught up with Liza, who I haven’t seen for way too long. Spent some time out on their patio, which overlooks the East River and the Manhattan Bridge. Felt a bit like Christopher Walken in Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990). Matt and Liza went to bed around 1:30 am, I stayed up for another hour and a half to polish off the details for my WordPress workshop in the morning at Brooklyn College.

Friday, April 11th, 3:00-6:00 am
Against all good judgment and reason I go to sleep for three hours, and dream of New York.

Friday, April 11th, 6:00-9:45 am
Woke up at 6 am and worked on my presentation for two more hours, then struck out the door at 8:15 am, forgetting how long it takes to get from point A to point B for an inter-borough trip using the subway. Took the F train to Jay Street, got of and walked down Flatbush avenue to Nevins Street to catch the 5 train (which was the slowest express I ever took). Travel time for 7.1 miles was one and a half hours. Made it to Brooklyn College at 9:45 with only 15 minutes to spare.

Friday, April 11th, 9:45 am-3:30 pm
Gave a workshop to fifteen faculty on using WordPress, which was really just one way of introducing them to the Small Pieces Loosely Joined (SPLJ) approach to teaching and learning with technology. The workshop was a ball –I don’t think I ever had such a big block of time to talk specifically about SPLJ with so many faculty. In fact, the workshop actually ended up being five hours long because I refused to stop showing them things they could do, and a majority of the folks stayed which I’m taking as a good sign.

We spent the first half hour discussing the possibilties of an “educational publishing platform,” and how others have used it. There was real interest amongst several of the faculty present in thinking about WordPress (in conjunction with several of the other tools I presented, like YouTube, Google Apps, Flickr, and del.icious) as a way to cobble together an eportfolio system.

The next four and a half hours we spent working though these tools in a hands on manner. We covered the basics of WordPress quite thoroughly Each of the participants got a blog through Edublogs (thank you James Farmer!) and we started from there. Brooklyn College is currently considering WPMu and has setup a preliminary installation, but it wasn’t entirely ready for primetime. I didn’t want the participants to suffer through these limitations, especially since the logic of the talk is that you can do much of this on your own regardless of what an IT department offers you.

After everyone was familiar with WordPress as a publishing engine, we covered everything from embedding YouTube videos to linking Flickr images to the value of Creative Commons to the move towards open educational resources to the power of networks (in this regard Twitter was a huge hit, after doing a shout out—a la Bryan Alexander—I got a large number of immediate responses from all over the world, which I could see blew many of them away). In fact, Twitter might be the single best tool for both visualizing and demonstrating the idea of a network, as well as its potential power.

I created a resource for the workshop on edublogs here, and many of the faculty created some impressive blogs/sites in the short time we had. For example, check out Karl Steel’s blog (a Medieval Literature professor at Brooklyn College) who is already a prolific blogger, but wanted to see some of the benefits of WordPress in action. All in all, the workshop was a blast, and I truly hope that Brooklyn College is able to support the innovative, web-based work this group is chomping at the bit to do, or at the very least is smart enough to get out of their way and let them do it with a SPLJ approach —the days of BlackBoard are over, and I’m afraid the CUNY system will refuse to recognize this fact until it is too late.

Friday, April 11th, 3:30 pm -5:00pm
From Brooklyn College, I strolled about ten blocks to Avenue J to meet up with Matt at DiFara Pizzeria for what is arguably the best slice in Brooklyn, and by extension the planet. DiFara Pizzeria has been around for over 40 years, but has recently become a more widely known phenomenon being hailed by as one of the best slices around by various food writers—something I agree wholeheartedly with. Yet, I think the popularity of DiFara has far more to do with the fact that Dominic DeMarco (the owner and proprietor) has labored individually over every pizza ever made there. He works 12 hour days seven days a week, and has only closed down on two separate occasions in 40 years: a trip to Italy in the late 80s and a more recent foot surgery. Fact is, he won’t open his pizzeria if he can’t make the pizzas, and watching him make your pizza is part of the joy of going here, for the joint is just a regular Brooklyn pizzeria, but the owner is a character whose singleness of purpose has resulted in a kind of cult following that seems to be quickly leading to a more international fame, at least in the pizza world. Our pie was half meatball and half sausage, and wholly delicious. The prices have doubled since the last time I was there a number of years ago—I chalk that up to all the fanfare. It was strange to see a slice of pizza selling for 4 dollars, but this may be that rare occasion when it’s worth it.

Friday, April 11th, 6:50pm-9:00pm
From DiFara’s, Matt and I jumped on the Q train and headed to the Atlantic Avenue station have settled on adding to this already amazing trip yet another layer of genius, taking in a movie at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematèk! The BAM’s Cinematèk is, as of right now, my favorite place to go anywhere in the world. I will be writing an entire post about the amazing film we saw called Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (1959), and directed by Tomu Uchida (who is a Japanese director who is virtually unknown in the West), so let it suffice to say for the moment that the BAM’s film programming has got to be the best in the nation, and perhaps a strong contender for that title more globally. A true cultural resource that is without equal in my mind. Lavish 35mm prints in a real theater with real popcorn and real soda and real people in a real city. I can’t begin to express how wonderful it was to be back at the BAM enjoying a movie I would never have access to otherwise. The unadulterated act of truly losing yourself to the magic of cinema in the environment it was meant to be experienced is without parallel for me.

Friday, April 11th, 9:00pm-1:00am
Right after the movie, we walked about three or four blocks to Freddy’s Bar which is just another highlight of some of the best 36 hours I have yet to have in my life. Freddy’s is a Brooklyn attraction for a host of reasons: affordable beer, a great old school bar, a relaxed crowd, its public attacks against the Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project (one that will further divide and gentrify this great city within a city). But if I were to be honest, the reason I love to go to Freddy’s is for Donald O’Finn’s “TV Dreams” - a never ending series of VHS tapes featuring the most tripped out and intelligent re-cuts of movie clips, commercials, and various other resources you can imagine. I have wrote about these masterpieces already here, and seeing them again just re-affirms just how amazing this artist is on so many mashed up levels. His work provides a superb example of the mashup as de-contextualizing the medium from the message in order to re-contextualize a mindful imagination. The tape on tap Friday evening was no different, we caught a few great series, one which featured all the far out clips of people dancing from about 400 films I never saw, where does he find all this stuff? I really want to call him up and talk to him about where he sees his own art in relationship to the current state of copyright, mashups, and digital media more generally.

Saturday, April 12th, 1:00 am -3:00 am
Matt and I voyaged out into the rain drenched streets of New York and took the Q train at Atlantic Ave. to Canal Street, then hailed a cab back to Matt’s apartment on the Lower East Side. I quickly packed up, said goodbye and caught a cab back to Penn Station to conclude a really amazing trip. Special thanks go out to “Old Gold” Matt Gold for his unbelievable hospitality and push to make the little time we had some of the most enjoyable ever. I mean come on pizza, movies, Brooklyn, beer, video art, and on and on and on….what more could you want, huh?

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Carole Garmon pointed me to a beautifully disturbing re-enactment of a performance piece by Allan Kaprow’s “Shake It,” (1972) or at least that’s what I think it’s titled. I didn’t know anything about Kaprow before Carole explained his influential role in defining the concepts of performance art as well as helping to develop the “Happening” in the late 50s and 60s.

I dug a bit more on Kaprow, and I fascinated with his notion of “un-art.” He has a couple of essays on the subject titled “Art which Can’t be Art” and “The Education of an Un-Artist,” the last essay suggests an interesting confluence with a mashup un-artist who may have very well be exploring Kaprow’s themes given his deep knowledge and appreciation of all things avant-garde (just a theory). I also found two books of essays, “Untitled Essay and other works” (1967) and “Some Recent Happenings” (1966), on UBUWEB.

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Via the great Luke Waltzer…

 

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You can file this one under “Just Another Web 2.0 Service Cautionary Tale.”

I was planning on working on my Italian by sub-titling a short commercial for this post I plan on writing using Mojiti (an online service that allows you to annotate videos on YouTube and other services), when I discovered to my great dismay the following message:

You’ve heard this story a million times before, but it’s actually the first time I had stuff on a service that I will miss a little bit. Fear 2.0 anyone?

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Here is a cool thing I discovered recently, and please forgive me if it is already common knowledge. There is a little hack for getting RSS feeds for tags on YouTube, and it goes like this:

http://youtube.com/rss/tag/randomtag.rss (where randomtag is the tag you want to aggregate)

Here are two examples of this tag-based feed. Andy Rush has put together some very cool screencasts for UMW Blogs which are appropriately tagged umwblogs. So, when you include http://youtube.com/rss/tag/umwblogs.rss in some kind of an RSS reader or aggregator you get the following:

WPMu Ed » Reading Capital, Part 3: Forums vs. Discourse

Posted 3 hours ago

World Forum 1 image courtesy of Dunechaser.

This part of the Reading Capital discussion framework looks at the Reading Capital Forums (powered by bbPress) and a feature called Discourse which is the theme Prologue for WordPress blogs that offers a similar functionality as Twitter without the 140 character limitation. Despite what the title of this post might suggest, this isn’t an either/or choice, but I would like to think about how the two might offer different approaches to online conversation and discussion

Forums

The forums for the Reading Capital site are using the bbPress software which has a number …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation

Posted 3 hours ago

Marx and Engels lego photo used courtesy of Dunechaser

So I’m finally returning to creating a discussion framework for the Reading Capital site. I will detail my thinking for the design of the site below (and in at least two subsequent posts), and I invite any and all recommendations and criticisms. It’s a model that is far from perfect, but provides an opportunity to look at how we might provide a platform for aggregating and re-presenting posts and discussions in a distributed manner.

For the technical details behind this setup go here for more information.

Section 1: Blogging

I am …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Self-Service Feed Aggregation with WPMu

Posted 3 hours ago

This post will detail how to create an aggregator site wherein people can simply add their feeds to a site and have their content automatically re-published. This example is specifically for WordPress and/or WordPress Multi-User. It depends upon three plugins, so download them ahead of time from the links below:

1) Oz Politics’s BDP RSS Aggregator

2) Andre Malan’s Add RSS extension widget for BDP RSS

3) Charles Johnson’s Feed WordPress plugin

Here’s how (and note that all the images below link to larger versions for your viewing pleasure):

Setting up BDP RSS

First you need to install, activate and setup …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » All Kinds of Domain Mapping with WPMu

Posted 3 hours ago

So the last two days have been a lot of fun, I have been mapping all the domains I currently have to one WordPress Multi-User installation, and I’m glad to say it has worked like a charm (you can find my previous discussions of the process here and here). I had problems at first because the latest version of FeedWordPress 0.993 creates some conflicts with WPMu 1.5.1 which prevent you from creating new blogs and also breaks the incoming dashboard feeds. After I deactivated FeedWordPress everything worked like a charm, and I now have ten different domains mapped to one WPMu …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » The Design of Openness

Posted 3 hours ago

Photo thanks to Bern@t’s Flickr stream.

Cole Camplese recently had a provocative post about open design that has me thinking about a few things that might frame some of the ideas that I think are key to imagining a loosely joined, open, and mashable community for teaching and learning.

I am thinking more about how openness should be built into the design process. Not really instructional design per say, but design in general … in my mind learning design is looking at the notion of building learning opportunities in a more broad sense than more strict instructional systems design.

…

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Twourse Design

Posted 3 hours ago

Today I got to thinking about something while talking about building a community site: where is my community right now? Well, Twitter, and at this very moment I can see all kinds of cool things happening. I’m currently following two of my favorite people, Shannon Hauser and Brian Lamb, exchange ideas about music. They’re both excited about what thy are sharing and it is cool to watch and learn from. In fact, I can partake by tracking the dialog and following their links. Not to mention that at any moment I could jump in, even if after the fact. The coolest …

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WPMu Ed » Finally, Course Aggregation Made Easy

Posted 3 hours ago

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, it took us over a year, and with several iterations along the way, but I think UMW Blogs will now be able to provide dead simple aggregation of posts from numerous, distributed blogs with very little work, but a little bit of money for the plugin extension ($50 to be exact). Henri Simeon’s MuTags plugin and the $50 extension we bought from him gave UMW Blogs a RSS feed for each and every site wide tag.

Once sitewide tags have an RSS feed, the whole problem of grabbing each student’s RSS feed, …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 3

Posted 3 hours ago

So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 2

Posted 3 hours ago

So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?

That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 1

Posted 3 hours ago

It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.

This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Is This Effective Communication?

Posted 5 days ago

My feeling is that this would make a fine satirical cartoon inside the New Yorker. But to give it the cover? Not so sure about that.

Understandably, the Obamas ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading. The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple. As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons who ‘don’t do nuance.’” To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”

People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Is This Effective Communication?

Posted 5 days ago

My feeling is that this would make a fine satirical cartoon inside the New Yorker. But to give it the cover? Not so sure about that.

Understandably, the Obama’s ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading. The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple. As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons to ‘don’t do nuance.’” To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”

People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Reading Capital, Part 3: Forums vs. Discourse

Posted 8 days ago

World Forum 1 image courtesy of Dunechaser.

This part of the Reading Capital discussion framework looks at the Reading Capital Forums (powered by bbPress) and a feature called Discourse which is the theme Prologue for WordPress blogs that offers a similar functionality as Twitter without the 140 character limitation. Despite what the title of this post might suggest, this isn’t an either/or choice, but I would like to think about how the two might offer different approaches to online conversation and discussion

Forums

The forums for the Reading Capital site are using the bbPress software which has a number …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation

Posted 8 days ago

Marx and Engels lego photo used courtesy of Dunechaser

So I’m finally returning to creating a discussion framework for the Reading Capital site. I will detail my thinking for the design of the site below (and in at least two subsequent posts), and I invite any and all recommendations and criticisms. It’s a model that is far from perfect, but provides an opportunity to look at how we might provide a platform for aggregating and re-presenting posts and discussions in a distributed manner.

For the technical details behind this setup go here for more information.

Section 1: Blogging

I am …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » Self-Service Feed Aggregation with WPMu

Posted 8 days ago

This post will detail how to create an aggregator site wherein people can simply add their feeds to a site and have their content automatically re-published. This example is specifically for WordPress and/or WordPress Multi-User. It depends upon three plugins, so download them ahead of time from the links below:

1) Oz Politics’s BDP RSS Aggregator

2) Andre Malan’s Add RSS extension widget for BDP RSS

3) Charles Johnson’s Feed WordPress plugin

Here’s how (and note that all the images below link to larger versions for your viewing pleasure):

Setting up BDP RSS

First you need to install, activate and setup …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » A very long sentence

Posted 3 weeks ago

I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.

“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » How to Tell A Story

Posted 3 weeks ago

Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.

I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.

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[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Navigating the Messages at the Ballpark

Posted 4 weeks ago

A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half …

[Link]

andremalan.net » In honour of Dr, Donald Wehrung

Posted 4 weeks ago

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I was invited to attend a ceremony to celebrate Don Wehrung’s contribution to the International Student Initiative at UBC. It was an incredible ceremony and all the speakers did a fantastic job of highlighting what a great man Don truly is.

Don is the person who was asked to head the International Student Initiative when it started back in 1996. The goals of the program was to increase the number of international students at UBC. Don has been incredibly successful, around 10 percent of UBC students at the moment being international. One of the most …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Navigating a Ballpark

Posted 4 weeks ago

A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » The 8th Annual Symposium Blog

Posted 5 weeks ago

The Symposium Blog is up and running!

The Miscommunication: 8th Annual Symposium blog had it’s opening post on June 5th at 3:03pm. For the next few weeks there will be regular posts highlighting different tables at the symposium. I have enjoyed reading through the notes and table discussions and looking through the photographs of the day.

As I worked on setting up the blog, I felt the urge to post every note and conversation and image that happened during the event. It seemed so important to share with all of the participants what had happened and show them what …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Technology: Miracle or Illusion?

Posted 5 weeks ago

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the final in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Since golf began being widely played during the 19th century until sometime in the middle of the twentieth, clubs had shafts of wood, not metal, certainly not graphite. The heads of clubs were slivers of metal about the thickness of a frying pan, the size of a silver dollar and had only a rumor of a “sweet spot.” A comparison might be playing tennis with an old-style 80-square-inch wooden racket strung with cat gut. …

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cac.ophony.org » “Drive for Show, Putt for Dough”: It’s the Small Stuff that Matters

Posted 5 weeks ago

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a …

[Link]

WPMu Ed » All Kinds of Domain Mapping with WPMu

Posted 5 weeks ago

So the last two days have been a lot of fun, I have been mapping all the domains I currently have to one WordPress Multi-User installation, and I’m glad to say it has worked like a charm (you can find my previous discussions of the process here and here). I had problems at first because the latest version of FeedWordPress 0.993 creates some conflicts with WPMu 1.5.1 which prevent you from creating new blogs and also breaks the incoming dashboard feeds. After I deactivated FeedWordPress everything worked like a charm, and I now have ten different domains mapped to one WPMu …

[Link]

cac.ophony.org » Linked Pursuits: Writing and Golf

Posted 6 weeks ago

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the first in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Golf can be a bit of a mystery to those who have never played. Mainly it probably appears (a) boring and (b) much easier than it really is. Writing can also look that way to the uninitiated, and in fact golf and writing have a lot in common.

Both are solitary, addictive pursuits of an ultimately unreachable perfection. How, you ask, is golf solitary, what with all the crowds and the playing partners and …

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WPMu Ed » The Design of Openness

Posted 6 weeks ago

Photo thanks to Bern@t’s Flickr stream.

Cole Camplese recently had a provocative post about open design that has me thinking about a few things that might frame some of the ideas that I think are key to imagining a loosely joined, open, and mashable community for teaching and learning.

I am thinking more about how openness should be built into the design process. Not really instructional design per say, but design in general … in my mind learning design is looking at the notion of building learning opportunities in a more broad sense than more strict instructional systems design.

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WPMu Ed » Twourse Design

Posted 6 weeks ago

Today I got to thinking about something while talking about building a community site: where is my community right now? Well, Twitter, and at this very moment I can see all kinds of cool things happening. I’m currently following two of my favorite people, Shannon Hauser and Brian Lamb, exchange ideas about music. They’re both excited about what thy are sharing and it is cool to watch and learn from. In fact, I can partake by tracking the dialog and following their links. Not to mention that at any moment I could jump in, even if after the fact. The coolest …

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cac.ophony.org » On Edupunk

Posted 6 weeks ago

Cacophony’s good friend Jim Groom (right) has recently coined a term that has the edublogosphere all atwitter: edupunk. It probably runs counter to the meaning behind the word to note, impressed, that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, “Wired Campus,” picked up Jim’s phrase. Punks probably don’t care much what the Chronicle’s got to say.

Edupunk (here are musings and run downs by Mike Caulfield, Stephen Downes, and D’Arcy Norman) is a new name for ideas that have been bouncing around the progressive edublogosphere for some time, namely, that higher education humanity needs an alternative to proprietary course management systems …

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cac.ophony.org » From literacy to digiracy: Will reading and writing remain important?

Posted 8 weeks ago

This article from the May 16, 2008 issue of The Economist is provocative in its challenge to us as business people, educators, and, to a lesser extent, students.

The content aligns well with what has been the major themes of the recent annual symposiums (at least the last two; maybe the last three).

Are we doing anything different? I don’t mean little things, but big things — things that embody a significant change in communications quality. Quite frankly, I don’t think I am, and I find this a somewhat humbling, troubling conclusion. Am I too set in my ways? Do …

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cac.ophony.org » The 8th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction

Posted 8 weeks ago

I was among the group of Fellows who attended the 8th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction, held on May 9th, 2008. Despite the weather, the turnout was great and we saw a lot of lively exchanges of ideas. Esther Dyson’s and Richard Lederer’s Keynotes were interesting and entertaining, and we enjoyed each other’s company at the table discussion and over dinnner afterwards.

This year’s theme was ‘Miscommunication’. In the table discussion, Olga and I were with facilitators Gardner Cambell (Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington) and Ruth-Ellen H. Simmonds (Executive Director, One Stop Senior Services), …

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andremalan.net » In the Summer Time!

Posted 9 weeks ago

Summer has just started and I am already finding it to be perfectly fantastic.

The first new development of my Summer was moving out of traditional dormitory style residence into Suite style residence… aka… an apartment. I now have a kitchen to cook in (an activity that I really need a lot more practice with), a lounge and bathrooms all to myself and my two roommates instead of an entire floor of 22 people. I also get to share this apartment with the lovely Miss Amy Tipton, one of my favorite people in the whole wide world.

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WPMu Ed » Finally, Course Aggregation Made Easy

Posted 9 weeks ago

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, it took us over a year, and with several iterations along the way, but I think UMW Blogs will now be able to provide dead simple aggregation of posts from numerous, distributed blogs with very little work, but a little bit of money for the plugin extension ($50 to be exact). Henri Simeon’s MuTags plugin and the $50 extension we bought from him gave UMW Blogs a RSS feed for each and every site wide tag.

Once sitewide tags have an RSS feed, the whole problem of grabbing each student’s RSS feed, …

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WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 3

Posted 10 weeks ago

So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and …

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cac.ophony.org » The humanities and social sciences in general education

Posted 10 weeks ago

I attended a particularly informative and inspiring session at the 4th Annual CUNY General Education Conference held last week at Baruch College. David Eastzer, a science teacher at City College, discussed his innovative anatomy syllabus (Beyond Anatomy and Physiology: Engaging Non-Majors by Incorporating Diversity and Social Science Perspectives on the Body). He approaches the material from a somewhat constructivist-historical perspective, actively encouraging students to think of science in terms of ideas to be reflected upon, rather than a set of facts to be memorized. His syllabus included texts which I would like use in my Sociology of the Body courses. I …

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WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 2

Posted 10 weeks ago

So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?

That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and …

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WPMu Ed » This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio, part 1

Posted 10 weeks ago

It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.

This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of …

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cac.ophony.org » The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint

Posted 11 weeks ago

What would it look like if Honest Abe had PowerPoint at his disposal on that fateful day in 1863?

Quite possibly, this.

Its creator, Peter Norvig, also describes his rationale here, and considers the value of PowerPoint in “PowerPoint: Shot with its own bullets,” which was published in The Lancet.

We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bullet-pointed bathwater, but the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation might prove useful for those discussing with students (or colleagues) what makes for good (and bad) PowerPoint.

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cac.ophony.org » Seeking an Audience

Posted 12 weeks ago

A couple of weeks ago I showed a draft of my dissertation proposal to my advisor for the first time. I knew that the argument was not solid yet, but also felt that I needed feedback at this point of my writing process. So, I struggled to let go of my initial plan to hand in a polished and brilliant prospectus and met with him. After long reading and writing sessions in the library, I was happy to learn that the argument I had been building actually made sense. I also learned that I needed to create and discuss this …

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WPMu Ed » Pickering Institute (ab)using WPMu; or what’s in a domain?

Posted 13 weeks ago

This is kinda fun, the for-profit online college Pickering Institute is using WordPress Multi-User to spread the good word about consolidating student loans, Vegas deals, and domain parking. Now I have championed WordPress Multi-User for a while now because it is what I am comfortable with, and I find it can be pretty effective for creating an online community for teaching and learning. But I wasn’t imaginative enough to think about puttin one of these installations on a .edu domain at charging advertisers $50 a month “to reach an education-minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass-market blogs such …

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WPMu Ed » 10 ways to use UMW Blogs

Posted 13 weeks ago

About two weeks ago I asked our kick ass student aids Joe and Shannon to start a wiki page outlining ten possible ways to use UMW Blogs. Soon after I went in and re-arranged, added, edited, etc. Last week DTLT’s newest ITS star for the Social Sciences, Michael Willits (who now gets a link back because he has finally announced he is moving off TypePad to WordPress ), gave some feedback on the list in the wiki page.

So, given that the list won’t ever really be done, and in the interest of making it available sooner than later …

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andremalan.net » Opening the Irving K. Barber Learning Center

Posted 13 weeks ago

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Julie Mitchel if I would be able to speak at the opening of the Irving K. Barber Learning Center. She wanted me to give a student’s perspective of what the Learning Center means to the students of UBC. I accepted, not really understanding what I was getting myself into. As the weeks went by subsequent meetings with Julie made me see that the ceremony was a lot more important than I ever could have imagined. For a great description of what the ceremony was actually about, Phillip Jeffrey wrote an excellent …

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cac.ophony.org » A New Generation of “Native Tongues”

Posted 3 months ago

Parenthood is undeniably a blessing. Yet, if I were to speak honestly, I’d note that there are certain drawbacks, not the least of which is ceding control over the soundtrack to your life. My sweet soon-to-be four year old doesn’t want to listen to many of my tunes. I’m fortunate that her choices are usually pretty tolerable. While I dig Dan Zanes or Laurie Berkner in small doses, they get play in our house mostly because the munchkin wants them.

Of course, she’s allowed her own music. I know our tastes will likely diverge through her adolescence, and we’ll have less …

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andremalan.net » Facebook Tip… make your profile more presentable

Posted 3 months ago

So after Looking at Mackenzie and Ciara’s Facebook profiles I saw that they both look much better than most people’s. The reason being that instead of having comma denominated lists like “Interests: running, swimming, hiking, hockey…” they put them in an actual list form like so:

Interests:

Running

Swimming

Hiking

Hockey

Ciara even adds breaks using dashes. I did the same and now my profile is no longer a jumbled mess… yay!

In fact it looks so good I’ll just include it on my about page on this site.

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cac.ophony.org » CLASP Colloquium

Posted 3 months ago

The CUNY League of Active Speech Professors (CLASP) is an association of the speech professors at CUNY. Every year CLASP organizes a colloquium to discuss and investigate all levels of teaching and initiating speech and oral communication across the curriculum at CUNY. This year’s theme was Teaching and Learning, and Community.

A tradition at the CLASP gatherings is intensive discussion on the most innovative and creative ways to teach and influence different disciplines with Speech theory and practice. There were two panels that dealt with the creative use of technology in the classroom where faculty from Communication Studies, History, Theater and …

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andremalan.net » My Vision for a Semantic UBC

Posted 3 months ago

This is my vision as for what we can do at UBC to create an expandable eduglu solution.

Most content will be stored in a wiki. Our wiki will be extended so that we can lock more sensetive pages for certain users.
In order to make our content semantic and to allow it to be remixed in ways that make sense we would use the SemanticMediaWiki plugin for our MediaWiki. A working example of this kind of wiki can be found here.This plugin allows users to define relationships between the article and its content. This data is then Collected and can be …

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andremalan.net » My essential Facebook Applications:

Posted 3 months ago

Here is a list of some of my favorite Facebook Apps:

FriendFeed: Allows me to publish my life stream on my Facebook profile

Boost: Boost is a Firefox add on that allows you to change the look and feel of Facebook. Adds a bunch of cool functionality like “download whole album” and showing full size images when you mouse over them.

Nexus: Creates a graph of your network. Really interesting to see how you are connected to other people and how connected they are to your friends.

FBcal: Generates an iCal file of your upcoming Facebook events …

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andremalan.net » Today’s realization:

Posted 3 months ago

Enej and I decided today that we need to start making this a reality at UBC:

from digitalbazaar

Still have no idea how. We will figure it out though.

So here’s how:

Now for where!

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andremalan.net » Edugluing things together

Posted 3 months ago

so here is a mapping of my plan for a UBC content management strategy. It is designed to overcome two obstacles:

1) Content changes, therefore the content stored in repositories has to change and be updated when the source is updated. This is overcome by using a wiki (this has been Novak’s vision of content management for a while) that produces RSS feeds along with an aggregator like Feed WordPress that updates the repository when a feed gets updated (that feature is still buggy at the moment, but I will get to fixing that ASAP).

2) The second obstacle is the …

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andremalan.net » The last piece of course blog the puzzle… for now

Posted 3 months ago

So it’s 4:30 in the morning and I am nowhere near ready to go to bed. So instead I did the final quality testing for my “add user widget” WordPress Mu plugin.

This plugin eliminates the question that I’ve been asked plenty of times “what if a student who is not in the class adds themselves to a course blog?”. I think the answer is simple (and I think Jim and Brian would agree with me)… just delete and/or ban the user. However, in order to eliminate this barrier on implementing course blogs I modified the plugin to allow professors …

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andremalan.net » Add User Widget

Posted 3 months ago

This plugin is a modification of sidebar add user widget by DSader. It adds a whole bunch of control functionality that allows admin to change who is allowed to add themselves to a blog and also what type of permission is allowed. It also changes the way that the widget appears depending on the user’s status. It was developed primarily for course blogs.

Update: V1.2

Changed the way restricting users works. Now the admin can simply set a password in the widget control menu and users who know the password can add themselves to the blog.

Donwload V1.2 Download V1.0 … [Link]

Username as a Tag
What’s more, if you want to aggregate by a user on YouTube, you can just substitute their account username for a tag (seems that YouTube treats the username as a tag). For example, http://youtube.com/rss/tag/jimgroom.rss will bring the latest videos from my account.

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Educational film to teach viewers about the dynamics of propaganda…A teacher dissects the processes in which propaganda works to an eager student. In it are moments of classic hokum, but curiously it all rings true today. Link.

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My UBUWEB rss subscription is the feed that keeps on giving. I scan it regularly, and indulge in watching a work by a filmmaker I haven’t heard of before irregularly. This time Harun Farocki’s video/documentary I Thought I was Seeing Convicts (2001) caught my attention. The film is about a maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. And in many ways traces the relationship between technology, surveillance, and control in the most oppressive of settings. Interestingly enough, the film starts with a kind of filmed screencast of how technology is used to control shoppers, and it quickly transitions to how similar technology is used in prisons to control convicts.

Moreover, the film uses the images from the prison’s surveillance cameras to tell its story (talk about fly-on-the-wall film making), and frames a number of the gladiator like fights in the concrete yard that, according to this film, are often framed by the guards and even bet upon. The fights ultimately end with shooting, and on a number of occasions the shooting have proved fatal.

Here are some foucauldian quotes that are laid over the images that in many ways stand in for any formal kind of narration (or narrative for that matter): “Today violence and power are (mostly) exercised impersonally” -a sentiment that is beautifully illustrated by the figures in the surveillance cameras that seem more like characters in a game than humans in a cage. The other quote that is a bit horrifying as you watch this short documentary is the notion that “the field of vision and the fire coincide.” As the write-up on the video page notes, “This video emphasizes the social relationship between the one who fires and the one who films, between the one with force and the one who takes shots.”

After watching this documentary, I saw another title by Farocki that caught my eye after a recent trip to Ikea, Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of Shopping Worlds) (2001) (interestingly enough made the same year as I thought I was Seeing Convicts). This documentary traces the immense thought, money, planning, and research invested in the design of shopping malls. It tracks the theories of entrance ways, profitability, leasing, the consumer’s gaze and a host of other fascinating issues that illustrate the ways in which the built environment of capitalism is in many ways a planned object of controlling the consumer — not always successful by any means, but premised on a notion of patterns, behavior, and a strange notion of faith.

These two relatively short documentaries come as a highly recommended double-feature that interestingly frame the design of control, something that certainly translates into all kinds of realms, but most certainly the online world.

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