Great article but they had me at "draconian." I married two weeks after my 19th birthday and 13 days before my husband was shipped to Viet Nam. (I never claimed to be good at decision making.) I never knew where he was or what he was doing. In theory, if his letters contained anything they could be intercepted and used by the enemy or I might have loose lips. Where do they get off completely isolating troops and why did they think this wouldn't affect moral? I'm just saying, how many totally messed up veterans does it take to reconsider the ramifications of policy?
In contrast, Daddy Bush's Gulf War was televised. Iraqi troops admit they watched TV and received info on whether bombs were falling short...etc. But the troops still were not allowed to use online tools to keep in touch with their friends and family.
Thank God the military has decided that allowing troops to tweet, FB etc, may keep them engaged with those they love, providing comfort and support when they need it most.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Is podcasting only for the young? By Matthew Lasar |
If you think that people who are young are more involved in technology than those who are old... If you believe that full time jobs and having kids leave very little time for anything, technology included... Here's an article with statistics that proves you are right.
As for me, I'm older than dirt and I love podcasting. My favorite was Oprah's Spirit Series, which I continue to listen to on my ipod. OK, as podcasting goes it's pretty geezer, but us boomers are redefining the whole geezerhood.
As for me, I'm older than dirt and I love podcasting. My favorite was Oprah's Spirit Series, which I continue to listen to on my ipod. OK, as podcasting goes it's pretty geezer, but us boomers are redefining the whole geezerhood.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Podcasting ala PodBean
A podcast is a series of audio and/or video files (in digital format, ie not analog) which are released episodically. Podcasts differ from other forms of sharing media from the internet (ie downloading or streaming webcasting). The distributor maintains a list of their available files as a web feed on their server. The person receiving the podcast uses specific client application software termed podcatcher. This will access the web feed, locate any updates and automatically download new files in the series. Automatic downloading of new files can be set up. While there are several file formats that can be used, MP3(audio) and MP4 (video) seem like standards for creating podcast media.
Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/) provides Podcast Aggregator which can be downloaded, allowing you to access their vast library of podcasts. Or one can peruse Podcast.com (http://podcast.com/) or the intelligent wonders of NPR (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php).
If I want to create my own podcasts I need a host. I located a free site called PodBean (http://www.podbean.com/).
PodBean Publishing Features:
• Easy to use - Even without programming knowledge one can create professional looking podcasts pretty quickly. Users are guided through the steps to upload, publish, manage and promote podcasts.
• Unmetered Bandwidth and Monthly Storage Increases – If your podcast becomes popular you will need more bandwidth. Podbean doesn’t charge extra for your needed bandwidth so you aren’t charged extra when your podcast goes viral. While there may be charges for increased storage, one can get started without unexpected charges.
• Design Themes Can Be Customized – Just like Bloggr, there are an assortment of starting designs. These can be customized by following step by step instructions. All designs come with widgets for Web 2.0 uses.
• Integrated Feed Generation – Creating feeds is simplified with their publishing tools which include a “full-featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM) plus intuitive feed editing, iTunes configuration and preview.”
• Analysis Tools – One can track the success of their podcasts with analysis tools. The statistics system provides data regarding visitors, subscribers, hits and geographical distribution.
• Income Options – If you decide to go pro the options include advertisement, paid subscription and merchandise sales. Subscription includes eCommerce tools for secure payments.
• Integrate With Other Formats – This provider allows podcasts to be integrated into existing websites, blogs, etc. Podcasts can be embedded in various media including emails, blogs, websites and social network sites.
• Mobile Access – Podcasts can be accessed via iPhone etc.
It's very tempting to turn my explorations in Web 2.0 into podcasts featuring the Techo-Gnome, my inept technology challenged alter-ego.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Photo and Media Sharing
Flickr is clearly a happening place. While I was looking around for a privacy policy I was informed that there had been 5,625 uploads in the last minute, 71,248 things tagged with jump and 2.5 million things geotagged this month. I was going to upload a photo of mine to see if it was part of the pool but the math is too big. Yes, the last minute is a link and you get pages of peoples pics, including a dirt road in Japan with a tag in Japanese.
I created the slide show for my blog in Flickr and here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumnertime/4295559503/www.shutterfly.com/
Features on Flickr include:
Upload - Upload from your desktop, send by email, or use your cameraphone.
Edit - Get rid of red eye, crop a photo, or get creative with fonts and effects.
Organize - Use collections, sets, and tags to organize your photos and videos. The Organizr is where both Collections and Sets are created. It also allows you to perform common tasks on large batches of photos and videos, such as tagging, changing permissions, or editing timestamps.
Sharing and privacy - Use groups and privacy controls to share your photos and videos. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking.
Maps - Share where your photos and videos were taken, and see photos and videos taken near you. So if is raining during your vacation you can pick up some pics from the same area from a vacationer who was luckier. Using the map is easy, you just drag-and-drop your photos and videos onto a map (using the Organizr.)
Make Stuff - Use your favorite Flickr images to create stuff on Snapfish. Cards, photo books, framed prints, DVDs, etc.
Keep in Touch - Get updates from family and friends. I got to see my granddaughter ice skate for the first time within hours of her leaving the ice.
Picassa seems to be smaller than Flickr, but at least they keep all the vowels. There seem to be some problems with people losing their images on Picassa but there’s no way to know if they just lost their account info. Here’s my account and a nice image of the sunrise from the surface of mars.
http://picasaweb.google.com/home
Features:
Album Privacy - As the album owner, you decide exactly who has access to your album. In addition to the different levels of album visibility, Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of the users you've shared an album with. Adding people to the "Shared with" list has the following benefits:
• Privacy. The people on this list are the only ones that can see albums set to the "Sign-in required to view" access level.
• Email notification. Everyone you invite using the Share button is added to the list and will receive an email invitation to view your photos. They also get notified when new photos are uploaded to the album in the future.
• Collaboration. You can choose to let people on the list add photos to your album.
Sharing - Use the Share button in Picasa or Picasa Web Albums to add people to the "Shared with" list and to send them an email invitation to view the album. Follow these steps
Add name tags -- Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them.
Collaborative albums -- You can upload to a friend's album directly from the Picasa software.
Geotag your photos with Google Maps – You can add geotags using Google Maps. Click the Places button and drag your photos to the location where you took them. You can still use Google Earth to tag or view photos if you prefer.
Import, upload, and share, - The import process has been streamlined so that you can star your favorites, upload to Picasa Web Albums, and share with Google contact groups at the same time.
I decided against joining photobucket.com/ and www.photoshare.org/. As a long distance Grammy it's all about sharing and I just don't know anyone who's using these. I haven't seen anything they offer that would surpass what I've got with Flickr and Picasa.
I created the slide show for my blog in Flickr and here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumnertime/4295559503/www.shutterfly.com/
Features on Flickr include:
Upload - Upload from your desktop, send by email, or use your cameraphone.
Edit - Get rid of red eye, crop a photo, or get creative with fonts and effects.
Organize - Use collections, sets, and tags to organize your photos and videos. The Organizr is where both Collections and Sets are created. It also allows you to perform common tasks on large batches of photos and videos, such as tagging, changing permissions, or editing timestamps.
Sharing and privacy - Use groups and privacy controls to share your photos and videos. Groups can either be public, public (invite only), or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking.
Maps - Share where your photos and videos were taken, and see photos and videos taken near you. So if is raining during your vacation you can pick up some pics from the same area from a vacationer who was luckier. Using the map is easy, you just drag-and-drop your photos and videos onto a map (using the Organizr.)
Make Stuff - Use your favorite Flickr images to create stuff on Snapfish. Cards, photo books, framed prints, DVDs, etc.
Keep in Touch - Get updates from family and friends. I got to see my granddaughter ice skate for the first time within hours of her leaving the ice.
Picassa seems to be smaller than Flickr, but at least they keep all the vowels. There seem to be some problems with people losing their images on Picassa but there’s no way to know if they just lost their account info. Here’s my account and a nice image of the sunrise from the surface of mars.
http://picasaweb.google.com/home
Features:
Album Privacy - As the album owner, you decide exactly who has access to your album. In addition to the different levels of album visibility, Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of the users you've shared an album with. Adding people to the "Shared with" list has the following benefits:
• Privacy. The people on this list are the only ones that can see albums set to the "Sign-in required to view" access level.
• Email notification. Everyone you invite using the Share button is added to the list and will receive an email invitation to view your photos. They also get notified when new photos are uploaded to the album in the future.
• Collaboration. You can choose to let people on the list add photos to your album.
Sharing - Use the Share button in Picasa or Picasa Web Albums to add people to the "Shared with" list and to send them an email invitation to view the album. Follow these steps
Add name tags -- Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them.
Collaborative albums -- You can upload to a friend's album directly from the Picasa software.
Geotag your photos with Google Maps – You can add geotags using Google Maps. Click the Places button and drag your photos to the location where you took them. You can still use Google Earth to tag or view photos if you prefer.
Import, upload, and share, - The import process has been streamlined so that you can star your favorites, upload to Picasa Web Albums, and share with Google contact groups at the same time.
I decided against joining photobucket.com/ and www.photoshare.org/. As a long distance Grammy it's all about sharing and I just don't know anyone who's using these. I haven't seen anything they offer that would surpass what I've got with Flickr and Picasa.
Using a Blog for Art Instruction and Student Gallery
Using a Blog for Art Instruction and Student Gallery
Final Project Proposal
OLIT 593 Spring 2010
Submitted by Sumner Walz
Topic
Creating a space for students to be able to maintain a gallery of art work and critical commentary that coincides with the curriculum of an introduction to art course. This 100 level art course includes study of basic elements of art and a survey of art history. The gallery space should be viewable by all members of a course or group following this curriculum.
My interest in this topic
I currently teach an online course on Introduction to Art; the student population is composed of primarily rural New Mexico adult students. Through the process of revising specific aspects of the curriculum, I have found that these particular students respond extremely well to activities that involve web-based discovery learning of artists, works of art, and museums, galleries, etc.
I currently make use of tools within the LMS used at this particular institution (WebCT) for the students to maintain a gallery of their research and to demonstrate skills in critiquing art, however the tool I have been using is limiting and not intuitive. It doesn’t allow students to link to images on the Web, so they have to download images and upload into the tool, which is often a struggle and problematic. There is no mechanism for peer review and commenting directly within the gallery space. The gallery space is removed from rest of the components of the lessons, which can make students crazy. Once the course is over, the students no longer have access to their creative work.
Using a Web 2.0 tool, in particular the blog format, would be a more creative and lasting environment for this type of student work and would foster learning skills that would extend beyond the limit of the course. Through the process of creating their own blog space, students could respond to lesson activities by linking instead of copying images and would allow them to extend their work to include videos, animated and interactive art elements. And I will enjoy being able to expand the lessons to include peer review and collaborative work through commenting. Within this format, I will also be able to incorporate other components of the lessons within the same space as the gallery work, which will be a more cohesive and structured experience for the students.
Outline
I. Instructional blog pages
...A. Header with graphical tie to the course
...B. Links to tutorials and help pages in support of the required work
...C. Links to sources of artworks, art databases, virtual museums, etc.
...D. Main posting area reserved for the current lesson activity
.......1. Instructor-posted image(s) and questions for critique
.......2. Student comments in response to critique questions
.......3. Instructions for student gallery work for the lesson
...E. Links to prior lesson activities
...F. Blog roll of the student pages
II. Student blog pages
...A. Main posting area for response to lesson assignment and comments by peers
...B. Links to prior lesson work
...C. Links to art and art sites of personal interest
I know the outline did not translate well.
Final Project Proposal
OLIT 593 Spring 2010
Submitted by Sumner Walz
Topic
Creating a space for students to be able to maintain a gallery of art work and critical commentary that coincides with the curriculum of an introduction to art course. This 100 level art course includes study of basic elements of art and a survey of art history. The gallery space should be viewable by all members of a course or group following this curriculum.
My interest in this topic
I currently teach an online course on Introduction to Art; the student population is composed of primarily rural New Mexico adult students. Through the process of revising specific aspects of the curriculum, I have found that these particular students respond extremely well to activities that involve web-based discovery learning of artists, works of art, and museums, galleries, etc.
I currently make use of tools within the LMS used at this particular institution (WebCT) for the students to maintain a gallery of their research and to demonstrate skills in critiquing art, however the tool I have been using is limiting and not intuitive. It doesn’t allow students to link to images on the Web, so they have to download images and upload into the tool, which is often a struggle and problematic. There is no mechanism for peer review and commenting directly within the gallery space. The gallery space is removed from rest of the components of the lessons, which can make students crazy. Once the course is over, the students no longer have access to their creative work.
Using a Web 2.0 tool, in particular the blog format, would be a more creative and lasting environment for this type of student work and would foster learning skills that would extend beyond the limit of the course. Through the process of creating their own blog space, students could respond to lesson activities by linking instead of copying images and would allow them to extend their work to include videos, animated and interactive art elements. And I will enjoy being able to expand the lessons to include peer review and collaborative work through commenting. Within this format, I will also be able to incorporate other components of the lessons within the same space as the gallery work, which will be a more cohesive and structured experience for the students.
Outline
I. Instructional blog pages
...A. Header with graphical tie to the course
...B. Links to tutorials and help pages in support of the required work
...C. Links to sources of artworks, art databases, virtual museums, etc.
...D. Main posting area reserved for the current lesson activity
.......1. Instructor-posted image(s) and questions for critique
.......2. Student comments in response to critique questions
.......3. Instructions for student gallery work for the lesson
...E. Links to prior lesson activities
...F. Blog roll of the student pages
II. Student blog pages
...A. Main posting area for response to lesson assignment and comments by peers
...B. Links to prior lesson work
...C. Links to art and art sites of personal interest
I know the outline did not translate well.
Obstrufication
The word for the day...Obstrufication
I've been using this word for about 40 years now. Not only is it useful, I can't come up with an adequate synonym (Cinnamon, if you ask my partner) which succinctly expresses the identical concept. Obstrufication means to make unnecessarily dense or complex, presumably to prevent others from comprehending it. I wanted to double check my spelling of it (which is really all about the "u") and discovered that while it generates 788 hits on google, it doesn't appear in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford Unabridged, the mother-lode of words.
We all (and by we I mean me and 788 others) all agree on the meaning of obstrufication. I learned this word in college, and now, decades later discover that it does not exist. What makes a word a word? Obfuscation, it turns out, is the word we've all been really meaning to use. (And by we I mean me and 788 others)
Just to make the time lost looking in online dictionaries and envisioning making my own Wikipedia page for those confused by obstrufication, allow me to share something useful I did find. Here's the top defining words of the 00's, which I refer to as the oh-ohs. http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/defining-a-decade/rogue.html
I think we've all learned something here today. Just cuz you learn it in college, pay off all those student loans, lead a productive life and use the word often doesn't make it real. You generally don't know what you don't know.
Now that's unnecessarily dense.
I've been using this word for about 40 years now. Not only is it useful, I can't come up with an adequate synonym (Cinnamon, if you ask my partner) which succinctly expresses the identical concept. Obstrufication means to make unnecessarily dense or complex, presumably to prevent others from comprehending it. I wanted to double check my spelling of it (which is really all about the "u") and discovered that while it generates 788 hits on google, it doesn't appear in any dictionary. Not even the Oxford Unabridged, the mother-lode of words.
We all (and by we I mean me and 788 others) all agree on the meaning of obstrufication. I learned this word in college, and now, decades later discover that it does not exist. What makes a word a word? Obfuscation, it turns out, is the word we've all been really meaning to use. (And by we I mean me and 788 others)
Just to make the time lost looking in online dictionaries and envisioning making my own Wikipedia page for those confused by obstrufication, allow me to share something useful I did find. Here's the top defining words of the 00's, which I refer to as the oh-ohs. http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/defining-a-decade/rogue.html
I think we've all learned something here today. Just cuz you learn it in college, pay off all those student loans, lead a productive life and use the word often doesn't make it real. You generally don't know what you don't know.
Now that's unnecessarily dense.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
DeviantArt. You can look but don't chat...
DeviantArt has rules.
While searching for a social networking site I thought it would be interesting to find a space specifically for artists. (See the social networking site for artists I chose in an earlier post.) During my research a google search turned up a number of options including DeviantArt. The site looked great. It abounds with interesting art and there’s clearly socializing.
As of last fall this Los Angeles based site had over 11 million members and receives over 100 million submissions per day. I was surprised to see a related article in a subsequent search. DevientArt wants the world to know that they are not a social networking site. They’re annoyed that people are using it for that and would like all non artists to go away. More importantly, they would like the non artists to take their blurry photos and provocative poses elsewhere.
As an artist I could join. But the assignment is to check out social networking sites. So if you’re headed to DevientArt I can save you a trip. Enjoy the art but don’t annoy anyone.
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