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November 30, 2004
Student Work
Due to illness' I am now officially two weeks behind in assessing student work. This means the computer system where I enter marks is officially closed, and so students who are busy checking their results online are seeing themselves with either a result withheld or fail. This is not good. Due to other circumstances I also was late in semester one. There's a pattern here, isn't there? Never again, ok, I've said it publicly, so, no more.
So, I've started marking student blogs, where they have to submit 10 entries. The criteria are quite straightforward: have they submitted 10 entries, are they from a range of dates, does the blog indicate regular use, is their an indication of what has been learnt in the entries, and do they indicate a learning progression. This is quite hard for the students to nominate, but it is something that I expect them to be able to do.
Anyway, here are some of the brief blog moments that they've self nominated for me.
- Takashi's sad photo (which became a series).
- Amalia trying to rescue herself
- Kate's reflections on the difference between blogs and page journals (remember, this is first year) and on google identity, and on the problems of writing a hypertextual essay
- Charlie working out things about identity and voice and then wove an entry (whereas for their first semester of blogging there was no expectation that they would or had to do this) about the blog fad
- Mithila asks a very good question about assessment
- Tara managing to include sex as a heading for her blog which seems relevant to her discussion of endings and begins to think about fictional possibilities, and on the differences between hypertext and linear essays
- Renee on constraint versus freedom (though she wouldn't call it that) and her development of peer assessment
- Andrew's neologism describing his experience of the subject (everyone had to do this)
Well, that's enough for today. The blogs with these students have been surprising. We are using them in a whole of program approach and so the first semester was really to get them comfortable with the idea of writing regularly in a blog environment. No examination or exploration of social software or of blogging beyond basic journal writing. But of their own accord they've gone way further than this. I imagine it helped that we also taught very strong fundamentals in HTML code, so they 'owned' their blogs. Also they were free to post what they liked, subject to the broad requirements of the University electronic communications policy (which pretty much means no theft, slander, vilification). As the list above indicates (well, what I've seen so far), every student seems to have something sensible to write about at some point.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:07 PM | TrackBack
November 29, 2004
Interview in Brazil
There's an article on videoblogging in a Brazilian newspaper, Folha, well the online edition anyway. covers several screens, and parts of an email interview with me are included. It's by Juliano Barreto and starts here, and is in Portugese.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:03 AM | TrackBack
November 24, 2004
EPIC 2014
EPIC 2014, from the Museum of Media History, circa 2014. Nice flash piece that I will certainly be using as an example to students to get them to think about online essays and academic argument. It isn't an academic piece, but could be.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:13 PM | TrackBack
November 22, 2004
Vogbrowser Beta
Kenyatta has built a prototype vogbrowser. There's a brief discussion on his blog. Don't like the idea of Flash, at all.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:55 PM | TrackBack
Old Anxieties
Via Collin this article from a librarian about how blogs (and wikis) allow all unsullied opinions to exist out there. What I like is the fear and loathing hidden away in the "Actual knowledge is purely optional".
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:56 AM | TrackBack
November 19, 2004
Another Sickie
At home this Thursday, feeling sick and sorry for myself. Slight fever, night sweats, a throat that is red raw. What I thought was going to be a minor day off has turned into four days away from work. My well intended time management plans are now awry. The body, just another vehicle for noise.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:37 PM | TrackBack
November 17, 2004
Sick Week
Been quiet around here lately. Been looking after my sick daughter, Sophie, all this week, and of course I now have the throat infection come viral fever that she had. There goes all that I was going to finish this week (and it was supposed to be a week involving quite a few finishings).
What I like though is that I haven't had an issue just stopping everything and looking after Sophie. Once upon a time I think I would have felt almost imposed upon, since I do have quite a lot of work that is becoming urgent. But, my daughter's ill. I know that sounds ghastly and a sure sign of being a workaholic. And a disturbing lack of perspective. But I'm getting one.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:08 PM | TrackBack
November 12, 2004
Job in VideoBlog Land
From videoblogging:
We await the outcomes of this with interest!
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:29 PM | TrackBack
Electronic Book Review and First Person
First Person has extended, or at least made literal, the visual metaphor used in its book design. Rewind that. First Person is an anthology of essays on new media and related fields. Visually it is designed to appear a bit like a web page, tab like elements appear on each page to indicate where in the book architecture you are, and invited responses trail across the bottom of each page offering metacommentary.
Well, they've made that literal by inviting further commentary and then publishing this online via the Electronic Book Review. I was fortunate enough to be invited to write a response to the Hypertext and Interactives section, and it is now available.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:43 PM | TrackBack
Varacast: QT Tools for the Rest of Us
Videocue and Wirecast are two products from Vara Software. I've trialling Videocue for vogging, though I think it will only do text tracks, and Wirecast looks ideal for a project I was going to work on which involved building a QT conferencing tool. That these tools are now appearing is a great indication of the very near future. Most people don't know you can have text tracks in QT, here's a commercial product that does it, simply, easily, and (I'm about to see) successfully. Not sure if it supports hrefs.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:48 AM | TrackBack
November 09, 2004
The Beginning
From the videoblogging list I found about this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/squaredcircle/show/. It is a 'movie' made up of photos that have a common metadata tag attached. This is exactly the sort of thing that we need to start doing for video blogs. The url was sent by Ryan Shaw, the email conversation is cited below.
>if you want audience, serialisation, and 'shows' go for it, use
>syndication. i think using aggregation to achieve this is 1000% more
>interesting than centralising which is what the above sort of models.
>blogs work because they're decnetralised. why reintroduce old media
>structures into a distributed network that works because *all* bits are
>distributed?
>
>this is where the rss/aggregation stuff is critical. imagine we all made
>a 60 second bit called "Christmas" and then aggregated that. that's a
>show. that's a new sort of show and that is what we ought to be worrying
>about
>
I totally agree. It is very close, I think. Today I found this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/squaredcircle/show/
It's a collaborative movie. A very abstract one, but that's what the tools are limited to now. But it's amazing what can be done even given the limitations we have now.
So, let's do this. We should work out a theme and invite contributions and aggregate those. This is certainly a project that I've already planned to do with students in 2005. Let's invent a new genre of video come vog, the aggregated program.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:24 PM | TrackBack
Because Otherwise I'll Loose It
http://www.wotif.com.au/ is a site that accesses cheap accommodation at hotels around Australia. Seems to provide standby rates, and there are excellent bargains and it's a good way to find cheaper somewhere to stay when travelling, etc. Stuck it in the blog otherwise I'll just lose the bloody thing.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:15 PM | TrackBack
November 08, 2004
GNEE - Watch 3G camera phone 3gp video uploads. 3G Video Vidbloggers promote your video blog.
GNEE - Watch 3G camera phone 3gp video uploads. 3G Video Vidbloggers promote your video blog., which is lifted straight from the header of their page... This is a new project that lets you email or upload 3g video from your mobile phone and post it. There seems to be a rating system to rank content, and (I haven't checked) a system to allow the content to appear in your own blog.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:48 PM | TrackBack
Transparent Assessment
I'm currently trying to assess quite a lot of student work (from three different subjects), and to make this easier for me and better for the students I'm preparing an assessment feedback form. This is a list of check boxes that indicates what qualities or properties the work expresses. This frees me up from having to write a lot of comments, and also makes explicit to the student just what they're being assessed on. While writing this for Network Media it struck me that not only should this have been presented to the students (I already do do this for other assessment tasks) but that some parts of it should be either defined or discussed explicitly with the students. For example, they've all just finished writing HTML based academic essays. These essays are a response to extracts from the three key theoretical readings from this semester. The essays are to be academic, but to be multilinear, exploratory, and to respond to this proposition:
(Remember, they're only in their first year.) In writing up the assessment outline proforma thingiemajig I was writing a criteria that more or less says "Does the essay express academic knowledge? Yes | Partially | No". This is a key criteria for me, as it helps the students understand that what they're being invited to do is to not be designers or just respond in some sort of open subjective opinion led manner, but to construct academic knowledge. The rub is that they're understanding of this is via traditional essay writing, and so the requirement that it be multilinear and interlinked, at least by the number of questions I was fielding, seemed to work well in getting them to begin to reconsider academic writing as a practice. So, what do I mean by 'academic knowledge'. This is implicit to me, though probably as much a result of having taught academic hypertext writing since 1995, and so I realised, in one of those in-retrospect-so-obvious moments, that I should have just asked them to define what they thought I meant. And taken it from there.