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Strange Correspondences and Grand Harmonies

Barbara Dieu — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:45:45 +0000

Like D’Arcy Norman in his post “Bags of Gold”, I have been pondering over Gardner’s figures of speech. Over the 48 minutes the video lasts, I was constantly reminded of how “American” the pitch and rhetoric sounded to me and wondered how given cultural icons/inferences influence this particular edtech sub-culture discourse and practice and how they strengthen/weaken it.

In order to have a better picture of the whole , I have noted down the words by subtitling the video at Universal Subtitles (corrections welcome) and jotted the main points, which now I transfer to the wiki I opened for ds106 in case someone is interested in/has time to deconstruct it.

Instead of responding “on the fly“, I decided to “switch off” the blasting radio , engage in other things that were “programmed” to be done and , in the meantime, observe the reactions of others. Under the pressure to produce and consume, it is difficult to find slow time to sit back, watch and reflect.

David Gallagher and Professor Noise well-illustrate how all this personal buzz and the constant flow of recursive, self-congratulatory messages tend to provoke cognitive overload. In addition to this, they hardly bring to attention those who have a different perspective or do not post very often. Exposure by quantity of posts and the use of marketing techniques seems to be one of the attributes of Web 2.0, a piece of business jargon to hype up services over products. Some posts that have caught my attention:

Jabiz Raisdana remixes some of Justin Hall’s angst and breakdown from this hysterical video to illustrate “the dialectical relationship and tension between hope and desperation” that accompanies our exertions in art, at work and on the web itself…

Megan Eichenberg’s New Digital Storytelling Project, which records her grandfather’s stories and perspective on life being stretched or reshaped by Alzheimer’s Disease, is a great example of how digital storytelling moves away from narcissism.

Leigh Blackall’s post on Lucrative Teaching and illustration on Flickr has definitely hit a nerve, which is positive as it makes people justify their positions by looking deeper at the variables involved and discuss issues which are often not taken into account when you focus on technology alone without considering a wider social and cultural context. One cannot deny social media does encourage a cult of personality and profiteer marketing. Not saying this is the case of the people involved, but as Chris Lott mentions, the incident provided a teachable moment in critical thinking and is a useful reminder of what may happen when an “outsider” challenges the group’s mores.

So, almost two weeks late on the assignments, I decided to merge the second and third in this collage, borrowing ideas from O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0, what other participants have written, cutting up sentences from Gardner’s presentation : No Digital Facelifts, matching them to snippets of songs, finding pictures to illustrate them and finally reducing this to a 3.0 minute video snippet which I have posted to my server and YouTube.

I have used Peter Shank’s Flickr CC to find photographs under a CC License, Audacity for the song and presentation clips, Open Office presentation slides with text converted into jpg to be thrown into iMovie and songs (mostly snippets of proprietary ones..argh..hope it’s fair use as it’s for educational purposes) as musical backdrop. Videos were converted into music and/or mp4 with Miro Converter. Also used Inkscape to remix Hokusai ‘s Koshu Kajikazawa net art.

Credits:
Gardner Campbell – No Digital Facelifts presentation
Songs (chronological order)

Star Spangled Banner – Jimi Hendrix (Woodstock Festival)
Moduless – The SlapHappy Bee III IP – 8bitpeoples
Music of the Spheres – Icarus at the Edge of Times – Philip Glass
Somewhere Over the Rainbow – Judy Garland
Running on Faith – Eric Clapton

Photos (two or three were on my computer for ages and cannot find the attribution link)

Campus Party Brasil 2009

Barbara Dieu — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:42:24 +0000

Edney de Souza (Interney) is in charge of the Campus Blog at the 2nd edition of the national Campus Party, which will take place in São Paulo from January 19th to 25th 2009.

The mega event, sponsored by Futura Networks and Telefonica, was first launched in Spain and is now yearly organized in Brazil, Colombia and Ibero-America. It covers 12 different areas: Astronomy, Blog, Games, Modding, Robotics, Simulation, Design, Photography, Music, Video, Development e Open Source. Last year’s creativity session was split up into Design, Photography and Video, so as to better mark the event as a cultural happening.

Like last year, I will also be part of the blogging area. I was invited to participate in a round table on “Blogs in the Classroom” together with Eric Messa (FAAP), Luiz Biajoni (Instituto Macuco), Claudir Segura (PUC-SP) on Wednesday 21st at 16:35. The panel will be moderated by ~~Bob Wollheim (Sixpix Content).~~ Rafael Bucco (editor of Results On magazine)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web and Pau Garcia-Milà (eyeOS) are some of invited stars and you bet I will be tweeting, photographing and reporting on the event.

Colloquium on Global Communication

Barbara Dieu — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:52:29 +0000

Elizabeth Hanson-Smith sent an invitation to members on the Webheads in Action list to participate online in the Colloquium on Global Communication for the The Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in Moscow. I accepted to give a presentation together with Sus Nyrop from Denmark, Cristina Costa in England, Rita Zeinstejer from Argentina and Ronaldo Lima Jr and Erika Cruvinel from Brasilia. After a series of mail exchanges, I set up a wiki , where we all gradually added our information, links resources and slides. I also used the presenters’ abstracts to compose the Wordle image that appears on the front page and which Elizabeth added at the bottom on the other pages as a sort of a logo.

As Natalie Udina (the organizer of the event in Moscow) and some of the presenters were not very familiar with the Elluminate platform in Learning Times, we set a number of rehearsal times for people to test and ask questions.

On the day of the event (October 24th) I almost missed the session because of the heavy traffic on the ring when coming back from the countryside, but fortunately I managed to arrive almost on time. Among the people present at the conference in Moscow, there was Dr. Anastasiya Atabekova, a representative from the culture section of the US Embassy in Moscow, some members of the local government, the University Dean, the pro-rector in science and other participants from different countries from Eastern Europe.

As my sound quality was poor and the wifi connection uneven, I have decided to record it again. While the original raw footage is archived and a bit difficult to retrieve inside the Webheads in Action room at Learning Times, the polished and interactive recording is here for those who do not want to log in.

Why teach social media?

Barbara Dieu — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:58:05 +0000

Howard Rheingold tells us in this short video snippet why he decided to start teaching courses about social media, using social media.

Is the message effective and is the video the best way to transmit it?

update: and how he does it

Digital collaboration vision at Ted

Barbara Dieu — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:41:43 +0000

Howard Rheingold makes a presentation at TED Awards about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action.

Impressions and presentation at CParty

Barbara Dieu — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:50:13 +0000

This is my 2nd day at CParty, interacting with mostly youngsters from different tribes (gaming, bloggers, barcampers, open source geeks, robotics, digital divide activists, greens), who are camping and mingling at the Bienal building. A show of cameras, journalists, ego massage but also sharing and lots and lots of conversations. I have documented some of it in Flickr.

A young journalist, in search of news, expressed his astonishment when he asked me for an interview “What are you doing here? Do you have to be here?” When I dutifully explained, he couldn’t contain himself any longer and fired: “Do you think you are discriminated against?”, Jeez…I stared at him dumbly. “What do you mean?” He was in turn disconcerted…I mean…your age…you being a woman and a teacher…”

Hey! I did feel very educational dispelling the dualistic digital immigrant and digital native stereotype. Here is a pic of another interview (in Spanish) which shows me with the barcampers (notice the reference to age/gender/job here again: Barbara tiene 54 años,/los chicos de barcamp). Can’t a 54-year-old teacher feel like a “chica de barcamp”? They have so much to teach me!

UPDATE: An interview for Nova Escola which highlights key points.

and here is a mix, remix and re-use presentation on blogs…and communities of practice…

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