I was up early this morning hoping to have a Skype link up with some friends in North Wales at a Reunion dinner. Synchronising time after a clock change made some fascinating maths!
I had two Macs running and had tested cameras and microphones a number of times. A test run earlier in the day with my host at the dinner had worked well although there was some latency.
Given the live nature of the event I was keen to have an alternative plan. Once we started testing the link for the live feed it was clear we had a number of problems.
I had not prepared a message in advance but as soon as the difficulties occurred I started looking for alternatives. Given I live in rural New South Wales some of the bandwidth available to me limited the options I had.
1. On one of my computers I had the old iMovie version.
2. I used the iSight camera to record the picture and a USB microphone for sound.
3. I exported the video as a .mov file to CD format for a file size of 5Mb. (A one minute message)
4. I tried to share the file via Skype (the first time I had tried this) but the file share failed.
5. My host recommended YouSendit.com but I was unsure about the sign up requirements.
6. I decided to use my Google video account to share the file and despite the bandwidth problems I have the upload and processing occurred very quickly.
7. I posted the link on our Skype chat and my hosts at the Reunion had the option of playing the video.
I am delighted that I found a way around the difficulties we experienced. The Reunion was very important to me. I have never attended a reunion of any kind but the opportunities to meet friends from 35 years ago made me think about flying from Australia to attend.
My video indicates why this was important.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=8185366881964703574]
Ironically the game the Reunion was celebrating was the start of my professional involvement in sport and I have spent the last thirty years working with educational technology in sport. It was fascinating that an early morning in Mongarlowe could trigger such memories.
Memories and Overcoming Live Skype Problems
090416 Gleanings
Each week I become more and more fascinated by what we can share. Twitter has accelerated this process for me although this week I have not participated at all.
Earlier this year I intiated some posts entitled Food for Thought and aspired to write a weekly alphabet update of blogs. I managed two editions of the post. I realised that despite my best intentions my divergent thinking sent me off on journeys that were hard to stop. I found them to be wonderful vectors of discovery.
I started this post in a workshop on Educating the Net Generation whilst managing to ignore Yammer, TweetDeck and Facebook!
Recently this TED video of Pattie Maes sent me off on another learning journey:
[ted id=”481″]
Such journeys are framed by many of the links Stephen Downes shares in OLDaily. I really enjoyed his most recent discussion of networks. I wondered if I had become an accidental connectivist after hearing a marvellous interview with David Kilcullen on Radio National. I had previously linked Stephen with Jeanette Winterson in an early post in this blog. I think Stephen and David would have a great deal to share too!
I found this presentation by David Wiley via Mike Bogle‘s Facebook post. It provided a great adjunct to Stephen’s presentation and explored openness and disaggregation in higher education.
YouTube had some fascinating action this week and the YouTube Symphony received a great deal of publicity. This is a link to one of the Australian contestants. I thought it was entirely appropriate that Michael Tilson Thomas was involved in this event.
I thought this much publicised YouTube video (17 million plus viewers 93,000 comments, 84,000 ratings) of Susan Boyle put the whole week in perspective for me … dreams do come true!
World Digital Library
It has taken me some time to catch up with developments at the World Digital Library (WDL). I missed this blog post from Lucinda Byatt‘s World of Words but did visit the WDL website.
From the WDL website:
The World Digital Library will launch on April 21, 2009. … and will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
I used Vodpod to import a WDL introduction video:
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.808612&w=425&h=350&fv=thisVideo%3Dwdl_web.flv]
Twitter and Visual Narratives
I have been trying to be part of the Twitter momentum so evident at present. My attendance at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009 at the National Library of Australia accelerated my interest in Twitter. I was fascinated by the backchannel potential of Twitter at the Forum (#iif09) but realised my own limitations in tracking conversations, listening to some remarkable presentations and blogging live. I realised too that it took a great deal of imagination and energy to be part of the Twitterverse.
I have been away from Twitter for a few days and a recent car journey gave me the opportunity to listen to a talk by Shaun Tan on The Book Show on Radio National. Shaun’s talk was on Visual Narratives and was the 2009 Colin Simpson Lecture for the Australian Society of Authors in Sydney. The talk is available as a podcast and as a pdf document.
Just as I am intrigued by the 140 characters available to me in Twitter, I am fascinated by Shaun’s discussion of visual narratives. In his talk he observed that:
Like writers, illustrators are not really attracted to their chosen language for its descriptive clarity or objectivity, but more for its slipperiness, mystery, ambiguity and accidental poetry. The best illustrated stories make the most of this, often prompting us to think about familiar concepts in an unexpected way, offering up a new and interesting perspective.
Shaun’s subsequent suggestion that “I realise that I share with many other illustrators a fundamental interest in ideas of silence and voicelessness” brought into sharp focus for me why I have been intuitively attracted to Twitter (and perhaps why I have failed so miserably at Plurk).
Shaun developed his theme with a discussion of the Lost Thing.
The Lost Thing, for instance, is an awkward, mute creature without any particular purpose or ability, and for this reason it remains largely ignored by a world that lacks the imagination needed to deal with it. Even the narrator of the story, a boy who is concerned enough to befriend this hapless creature, talks about it in an evasive way, without any description, and much less insight. Every illustrated scene frames a question for the reader: how might we deal with things that are outside of language, or lack any clear meaning?
He discusses the potential of photo albums as perfect examples:
of how illustrated narrative works most effectively, their power is not so much in documenting particulars, but triggering memory and imagination, urging us to fill the empty space around frozen snapshots, to build on fragments and constantly revisit our own storyline, a kind of visual literacy we all understand intuitively.
Shaun concludes with the observation that “our everyday … is a place of things one-half observed and one-half imagined, simultaneously familiar and mysterious”.
I believe the appeal of Twitter is this relationship between observation and imagination. Collectively and personally we have the possibility of engaging with the familiar and mysterious.
Two recent tweets caught my eye in this regard:
Biz Stone:
just helped a blind lady navigate from the subway to her destination — she knew where she was going but I’m still a little lost
Homeless man walking down 6th, casting with a fly rod. Apparently someone taught him to fish. Now he just needs a body of water.
Rose Holley Innovative Ideas Forum 2009: National Library of Australia
I have been tardy in writing this post! Whilst getting ready to write I read Katie’s delightful write up of the Forum. I thought her post exemplified the energy the Forum created and drew upon. Just as I was writing this I received an #iif2009 tweet about the availability of the podcasts from the day.
Rose Holley, Manager of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, National Library of Australia, presented the final talk of the morning at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009. Her talk was entitled “Enhancement and Enrichment of Digital Content by user communities: The Australian Newspapers experience”
Katie and the podcasts will help me as I left the Forum after Rose Holley’s talk. I did follow up her talk in her Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers report available here.
What I enjoyed about Rose’s presentation was her careful discussion and acknowledgement of the work of a small team (6 members) at the NLA responsible for delivering a remarkable project. My principal take home message from Rose’s talk was the power of community involvement in the enhancement process. A secondary one was her delightful discussion of the tag fog potential of tag clouds.
I thought Rose did an outstanding job at the end of a morning of illustrious speakers. Her humour and her profound knowledge made the time fly by. Her report provides all the detail included in her presentation and I recommend it to you.
I left the Forum highly impresed by the ideas shared and the possibilities that arise from social networks. I will follow up the iif2009 links on Slideshare too.
Mark Scott Innovative Ideas Forum 2009: National Library of Australia
Mark Scott was the third speaker on the program at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009. Mark’s talk was entitled Connecting with Audiences in the Digital Age.
Mark Scott has been the Managing Director of the ABC since July 2006. His talk explored the ways in which the ABC was exploring new ways to connect with audiences. He noted that the ABC is a vast network and operates the second largest media site in the world (after the BBC). Mark suggested that the ABC has a reputation for innovation in media space and prides itself on being Australia’s town square. This town square is located in new media opportunities including mobile technologies (see iView and ABC Mobile, for example). Nielsen’s (2009) Global Faces and Networked Places exemplifies the changing demographics for broadcasters.
Mark observed that the ABC creates content and uses whatever devices available to share this content (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter). He noted that the ABC has a very strong service for young people and accesses returning older listeners through local radio.
Examples of the ABC’s use of social networks include YouTube Summer Heights High and Ja’mie King’s MySpace page. This site acquired 67,000 friends in three weeks. Ja’mie’s Facebook page has 14,000 friends and exemplifies the power of viral engagement in social networks.
Mark noted increases in Facebook traffic (149% groth per annum) and the popularity of Twitter. Mark exemplified the potential of Twitter with a discussion of ABC Melbourne 774’s feed on Black Saturday. During the day there were 2500 followers but the multiplier effect meant that 300,000 people received messages originating with 774. He noted too that the ABC’s Q&A show generated significant amounts of Twitter traffic. It is exploring innovative ways to engage audiences. Like the Gruen Transfer, Q&A is using video for a range of purposes.
Mark discussed the strategic and operational implications of using digital media in innovative ways. He noted the ABC’s strict rules of operation and detailed editorial policies. The ABC has user generated content guidelines and is the first media organisation to do so in depth and online. These guidelines are receiving significant attention by international media organisations.
Mark affirmed the ABC’s responsibility to enable communities to share their stories through ABC Contribute. Other examples of this approach include: New Media Showcases; oral history projects for The Making of Modern Australia; Art on the Street uploads.
Mark argued that the ABC is reinventing itself to take advantage of new media. The future offers inclusive, interactive participative environments.
Library Labs’ post about Mark’s talk is here and questions posed to Mark are here.
Anne Summers Innovative Ideas Forum 2009: National Library of Australia
Anne was introduced as the second speaker of the day by Warwick Cathro. She discussed “The implications of web-based social networking for cultural heritage institutions”.
Many of Anne’s papers are held at the NLA (interesting to note in passing that “Anne Summers was selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia”). She noted, however, that her digial record is changing the amount of her files and papers.
Anne explored the implications of web-based social networking for cultural heritage institutions and discussed the generational change that is occurring in the recording of events. She noted the richness of archived collections of papers and illustrated her discussion with her work on Sir John Monash and Sir Keith Murdoch. She pondered the archival and curation processes for digital artifacts of more recent generations.
She discussed how cultural institutions might manage transient technologies. She used her own on-line digital identities to explore some of these issues.
Her website is a self managed site. it is used for book promotion, posting articles and speeches. Her blog (the blog) is a forum for the discussion of ideas and issues.
Anne has been using Facebook for some eighteen months and described her use of it for social networking. She noted, in particular, the use she made of Facebook for sharing links to newspaper and journal articles and columns. Anne noted too the use she made of Facebook for marketing and promoting events. She used the example of the Pen Poem Relay as a way of promoting causes too.
Anne considered the role newspapers will play in the recoding of events given analyses of trends such as these. She discussed briefly the contribution of the Huffington Post to on-line journalism.
She concluded her talk with a discussion of approaches to scholarly research and commended the serendipty possibilities available to those who left their digital research desks and explored rich archives of material reposited in cultural institutions such as the National Library of Australia.
Library Labs’ posts about Anne Summers’ talk can be found here and here. This is the link to questions put to Anne after her talk.
Marcus Gillezeau Innovative Ideas Forum 2009: National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia hosted the Innovative Ideas Forum 2009. I found the Social Networks page of the program fascinating. Items were being added as the forum progressed including SlideShares.
Jan Fullerton opened the NLA Forum and talked about the NLA as an early adoption organisation. She underscored the importance of the Innovative Ideas’ Forum to stimulate creativity and jolt thinking. The Forums have been important NLA staff development resources but they have become a significant open forum too. Jan confirmed that the NLA encourages exploration and has established some boundaries for ‘non catastrophic experience’. She summarised the content of the 2009 Forum and emphasised the dynamic and increasingly mainstream use of social networks. She concluded her introduction with a reminder that many NLA users want a ‘traditional experience’ of the Library in addition to the emerging digital relationships.
Warwick Cathro (Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing and Innovation, NLA) chaired the first session of the Forum. He introduced Marcus Gillezeau as the first speaker. His presentation was entitled “21st Century All-Media Storytelling – The freedoms and challenges of a multi-platform universe“.
Marcus’s presentation told the story of Scorched from November 2003 to March 2009. He shared with the Forum delegates the all-media approach to Scorched and presented a summary video of the production process that has led to an Emmy Awards nomination.
Marcus described the three-month lead into Scorched via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Faux websites were launched to support this approach. He presented examples of this approach from Scorched TV. The project had a four-year research and development phase that included In the Line of Fire.
Marcus illustrated the all-media approach to Scorched with examples from Cassie Hoffman‘s role in the story (and the influence lonelygirl15 had in Cassie’s emergence).
Marcus noted that social networks were the key to audience engagement in Scorched.
See the Library Labs’ blog of Marcus’s talk here and this post about the development of Cassie’s role here. This post has the questions posed at the end of Marcus’s talk.
Vale Joern Utzon
Lin Utzon said of her father, Joern Utzon, at his state funeral:
… he created a building so beautiful and so, in a way, self-evident that it seems as if God himself put it there.
He used to say the start of all architecture is an act of love.
Everywhen
Driving home from the National Library of Australia’s Innovative Ideas Forum 2009 I had the great good fortune to listen to a repeat of Radio National’s Late Night Live‘s discussion of W E H Stanner‘s work. One part of the discussion struck me forcefully.
Phillip Adams asked one of his guests, Melinda Hinkson, about Stanner’s concept of ‘everywhen‘. My understanding of the discussion that ensued is that ‘everywhen’ describes something that is somewhat timeless, not fixed in the past but part of the present and the future, all at the same time. This seemed particularly apposite to events earlier in the day at the National Library.
For example:
- Jan Fullerton opened the Forum and talked about the National Library of Australia (NLA) as an ‘early adopter’ organisation. She underscored the importance of the Innovative Ideas’ Forum to stimulate creativity and jolt thinking. She noted that the Forums have been an important NLA staff development resource but that they have become an important open forum too. Jan confirmed that the NLA encourages exploration and has established some boundaries for ‘non-catastrophic experience’. She summarised the content of the 2009 Forum and emphasised the dynamic and increasingly mainstream use of social networks. She concluded her introduction with a reminder that many of the NLA users want a ‘traditional library experience’.
- Anne Summers explored the implications of web-based social networking for cultural heritage institutions and discussed the generational change that is occurring in the recording of events. She noted the richness of archived collections of papers and illustrated her discussion with her work on Sir John Monash and Sir Keith Murdoch.
- Rose Holley raised some important questions about the enhancement and enrichment of digital content in her discussion of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. The program had benefitted from remarkable voluntary effort to collaborate in text correction. She emphasised the importance of transparency and trust that provided the foundation for an unmoderated correction (enhancement) service.
Whilst these presentations were occurring in the NLA’s Theatre, delegates were given access to a wireless network to encourage blogging and social networking (including the NLA’s own live blog at Library Labs). There was a lot of Twitter activity using the recommended #iif2009 tag. By the morning break the NLA was offering more IP addresses for all those wanting to log on to the network and NLA staff were putting out more power boards for delegates who had been blogging or working on-line during the first session. Some of the first Flickr photographs were appearing too with the iif2009 tag.
As I was reaching Braidwood on my journey home, Philip and Melinda were discussing Stanner’s advice to Gough Whitlam. As soon as I arrived in Mongarlowe I was able to find a record of an iconic moment held at the NLA just one hour’s drive away in everywhen time.
(Photo credit: In May 1975, Gurindji people were successful in having an area of their own land excised from the Vestey pastoral lease at Wattie Creek in the Northern Territory. Here Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari celebrate the handover of the land at Daguragu. The event was recorded visually and stored here.)
