Luca Agnani :: Showreel 2011 :: Digital lighting, 3d & visual mapping from luca.agnani on Vimeo.
This is a very neat piece of video editing by Luca Agnani highlighting the use of digital lighting and art. A good way to sart the New Year 
(via Mariarosa di Nublia).
In one of those curious cultural quirks, thousands of Germans will settle down this evening to watch the annual new years eve showing of ‘Dinner for One’, a 1963 comedy starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden. Why, no-one quite seems to know.
But now there is a remake The 90th Euro Rescue Summit – or Euros for No One by satirist Udo Eling who, according to the Daily Telegraph, “teamed up with state broadcaster ARD to rework the original, putting the French president’s head on butler James’ body, and the German Chancellor’s head onto the body of Miss Sophie.”
Unlike the original which is broadcast in English, the new version is in German. And for those of you whose German is not quite up to scratch the Daily Teegrapgh provides a helpful summary.
“Mrs Merkel follows the original Miss Sophie in assuming that her long-dead friends are there – whose drinks are all supped by the butler – and talks of former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
She also reprimands an absent British Prime Minister David Cameron that “German will be spoken at the dinner.”
True to the original, Mr Sarkozy, the butler, drinks for all his mistress’ guests and gets increasingly inebriated, prompting Mrs Merkel to say: “Nicolas, think of your credit rating!” – a reference to the downgrades looming over France from international ratings agencies.
At the end he helps her upstairs for what in the original is referred to as “the same procedure as every year” and in the satirical version would be conducted without Eurobonds. The butler says to Miss Sophie he will do his best as ever, promising to give Merkel his “Triple A”.”
FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.
OK….this is a techy video. But it is important. In an age when large software companies are increasingly controlling the internet, YaCy has been developed as a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. YaCy developers say: “When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”
I stumbled on thie excellent Art Threat web site featuring 10 documentary films on capitalism and economics. Art Threat says “With the Occupy Wall Street manifestations taking up much of our social and political imaginations these days, we thought we’d highlight a few great films that bring context to the current uprising and related issues.”
The first to be featured is The American Ruling Class, described as “An imaginative hybrid film (a dramatic documentary musical no less!) that follows the former editor of Harper’s magazine, Louis Lapham, as he encounters and provokes the haves of American society while giving due time to the have-nots and their rascally resistance tactics.”
No apologies for featuring another video from the Occupy movement. The Tent City University blog reports that on Wednesday we have Tristan McCowan, Rosie Peppin Vaughan and Elaine Unterhalter (all of Institute of Education, London) who will be looking at how universities can and have connected to social movements and on Thursday we have Ken Jones, Clare Kelly and Maggie Pitfield (all of Goldsmiths, London) hosting a discussion on the ‘The School and the Street’.
They have a great programme and its a lot cheaper than most other English universities!
Tent City Uni teach-in outside Bank of England from Jon Cheetham on Vimeo.
The wave of protests against the failure of the world capitalist system and the banking collapse are throwing up all kinds of alternative education events and movements. The #OccupyLondon protest has set up TentCityUniversity and this video reports on one of their seminars.
Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education from sam seidel on Vimeo.
I had the pleasure to present alongside Mike Neary and Joss Winn at the Mobility Shifts conference in New York. They are working on the idea of students as producers. This theme is also taken up in this excellent video, which looks at the theme of students as producers within hip hop culture.
Neat short intro to Freire’s idea of Critical Pedagogy. I particularly like the definition: “Critical Pedagogy is teachers asking why and students being allowed to ask the same question”.
We certainly need more debates about the future of education. And as Ceri Facer says in this video of an RSA seminar attitudes towards change in schools seem to swing in a schizophrenic swing between apathy and catastrophe.
By the way it is nice to see a serious debate about education that is not a TED talk. TED is getting horribly formulaic.
Yes its me! Nowadays we seem to spend half of our time at conferences interviewing each other. I am increasingly recognizing that asking the right questions is a skill. And I very much liked the questions I was asked in this video for the Institute for Emerging Leadership at Penn State University.
Sorry for the bad hair day!
From a Jisc press release:
Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal for teaching, research and general interest.
EUscreen – the result of a collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.
The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”
The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.
By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.
Open online seminar
Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).
The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”
You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/
EC-TEL 2012
The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.
The focus for the conference includes:
- How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
- How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
- How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?
The deadline for proposals is April 2.
Visitors and Residents
David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.
Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.
Watch the Pontydysgu Videos
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.
Our next programmes will be live from the German Moodlemoot in Emsden. Full details coming soon
