A friend and colleague, Gail P., had asked in the Teach the Web MOOC if folks would create video tutorials on how they are using the webmaker tools. I decided to take her up on the challenge with Popcorn Maker, and made this. I realized afterwards that the audio is low and tried my best to boost it up. Sorry about that!
Here is the Popcorn video that I made during the session for Gail, which builds off the Digital Is animation that I shared yesterday.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
One of the wonderful things about being part of a community in the midst of exploration is that folks share out all sorts of cool ideas, and then those ideas spark other ideas. The other day, I wrote about how Michelle in the Teach the Web MOOC explained how to use a view setting in Firefox to see a 3D image image of websites. My friend, Chad, then used a screenshot and added some art to the image:
He also suggested we think of ways to make art with the 3D modeling, which led to me think about making an animated video with Pivot Stickfigure, in which the character “climbs” up the architecture of a website. Instead of my own blog, I used the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site.
I’d love to see what other people might do. Is that a challenge? Sort of.
Peace (along the mountains of data),
Kevin
I’ve been trying to think about the act of “remixing” this week, mostly as a result of the activities over at the Teach the Web MOOC. My friend, Chad, shared this fantastic Ignite Talk video from Nishant Shah, who delves into the validation of remixing and how the act of remixing balances the art of creation, recreation and authenticity of the original work even while creating something new. Over at the MOOC, folks have been taking each other’s work and remixing it in different ways, so Nishant Shah’s presentation resonated with me.
I’m still struck by the question of whether most folks who publish original content are OK with remixing of their work by others. I’m not losing sleep over it or anything but still … the easy ability to take someone’s video or music or art, and recast it (either in a positive or negative light) with technology hints at the larger question of “ownership” in the digital age. Do we assume that anything we publish online is fair game for remix? It’s a fascinating topic, I think. (I am sure that somewhere, lawyers are getting paid a few thousand dollars an hour to argue about it).
See what Chad did to me, for example. I found it amusing, and insightful, but I admit to wondering when I first clicked the play button: what’s he done with my words and video and twitter feed? What if, instead of using my own blog post words, he put a political diatribe in there, against my political views (such as advocating federal support for the NRA or something)? What if the words coming out of my mouth were not my own? In that case, instead of being amused by the remix, I’d be angry at what he had done. But so what? The remix would have been published, distributed and out of my control at that point. Would my only recourse be another remix? (or hiring one of those lawyers?)
But I do know that I have students who do mash-ups of videos, and remix music that they like, and they don’t even think about ownership issues when doing so. They are only thinking that they want to remake the original of something into something new. THAT is the remix thought process for a lot of young people.
Peace (in the mixing),
Kevin
This was one of those “let’s give it a try” read-aloud books that my son and I found (in my classroom library, of all places) and soon, we were deep into the mystery unfolding. Dangerous Waters by Gregory Mone is set on the Titanic, so you know what is going to happen eventually. The ship is going down. But in the days leading up to the disaster, Mone introduces his young protagonist — Patrick Waters — who is a steward on the boat. Waters (I know, the name) meets up with a rich benefactor, whose treasured artifact is an original book by Sir Francis Bacon. The rich mans sees a potential intellectual in Waters and becomes his tutor during the first leg of the journey, discussing Bacon and Treasure Island with the young worker.
Meanwhile, there are two nefarious passengers on the Titanic who want the rare Bacon book for their own (the references to “I want the Bacon” and “Here is my Bacon” had my son laughing) because they believe the book may hold the mystery to unlocking the power of alchemy. They plot, maneuver, scheme and more in order to get the book, even as Patrick uncovers the plot, and becomes part of it. I loved that a treasured book was the center of the mystery, of course.
Another storyline involves Patrick’s older brother, who works in the bowels of the ship, pumping coal into the furnace that keeps the boat moving. It’s a tender touch to the story, and it allows the writer to bring some depth to Patrick’s character and history, as we learn more about his late father — a bibliophile who never fit in with the hard-scrabble Irish working class community where he lived — and the demands of his mother to find a good job with honor.
Disaster awaits, of course, and I won’t give it away, except to say that Mone keeps up a brisk pace with the plot and ends the book on a solid note of Bacon. Or is that a side of Bacon?
Peace (in the adventure),
Kevin
The other day, a companion in the Teach the Web MOOC shared out a feature in Firefox that I didn’t even know existed. It allows you to get a 3D view of a website. Check out these two screenshots that I took of my blog site:
What is amazing is that this tool is right in Firefox itself. No add-ons or anything. Here’s how Michelle explained it:
“Use Firefox. 🙂 Go to any page. Right click and go to “Inspect Element.” In the dark box that appears at the bottom of the screen, click the 3D cube button (“3D View”) in the upper right. You can then drag the visualization around and look at it from different angles.” — from Michelle’s post in the MOOC Google Community.
I was blown away by this simple rendering of a website, and then started to think: how might this be useful in the classroom? Sure, it’s cool. But is it useful? I think it is, particularly when doing lessons around the architecture of the web. Notice what elements of my blog stand up and out, and the question is: why? What content is there that makes Firefox separate it from the surface? How might we re-envision a website from a flat interface to a three-dimensional space? Intriguing ideas that will surely get kids thinking and playing, and wondering, right?
Peace (in the pop up world),
Kevin
Our task this week at the Teach the Web MOOC is to check out other people’s work from the first week of introductions and do a remix of their work. Interesting. I selected a profile page by Lou Buran because of some connections we have via the National Writing Project (it turns out, we have met, a few years ago, but I had forgotten that when I was working on his remix). I took a screenshot of his profile page from his Thimble page and then used Popcorn Maker to add some layers of pop-ups with notes to Lou about our connections.
After I had posted it in the Teach the Web Google Community, some folks suggested that others take my remix, and remix it again. Which is what Lou did. He took my piece, which was based on his piece, and added a third iteration to it. So now we have this remixing conversation going back and forth (which is when Lou reminded me that we briefly met one summer while working on the NWP Digital Is website). I am hoping someone else takes his remix and does it again. I wonder how the work will change as more hands get to work on it?
Pretty neat, and it all has me thinking of why we are doing this kind of activity and exploration within the MOOC. Certainly, my remixing of Lou brought me closer to him as a friend and colleague, and I was interested to see how he would take my remix and make it his own. I don’t suppose Lou minded what I had done but all this remixing and hacking work does bring up the issue of ownership, right? And I never asked Lou’s permission. I just did it.
Those of us in this MOOC probably are OK with others taking our digital stuff and doing what they want with it. But how about most people? Would folks outside of the MOOC be OK to know that a bunch of folks are taking something original, remixing it with new content and then publishing it to the world? I don’t know. What do we unwittingly give up when we post to a digital space?
I do know these are the conversations that we need to be having with students.
We hammer home copyright infringements, and how to use other people’s work with respect, and then we tell them: go hack this page and publish it? Let me say, I am OK with that. I think the goals here are to move more agency into hands of the viewer/reader and the Mozilla suite of tools does that in many interesting ways. Kids need to have skills to not just remix the web, but also to be critical of what they read and how they are targeted by the web, and having tools to remake that experience is powerful.
Still, I wonder about the conversations …
Peace (in the MOOC),
Kevin
My youngest son, in second grade, won first place in a short story contest hosted by one of our regional independent bookstores, and yesterday, he took part in the ceremony and read his story — Going Back in Time — to a crowd of parents, kids and patrons at the book shop. His story was inspired by the Dan Gutman series — Baseball Card Adventures — and tells of him using a baseball card to meet with Willie Mays in 1963. (The contest prompt was imagine going back in time or going ahead in time by 50 years — he was one of the few who went back in time, apparently). He won first prize for his grade.
I was so proud of him, as a young writer, and as a speaker, although he was nervous in front of the crowd. The story will be published in the local newspaper soon, too. Hopefully, this is the start of many more stories to come …
Peace (in the sharing of the news),
Kevin
PS — I suggested he send Dan Gutman an email, thanking him for the inspiration. I am trying to track that down …
As part of my explorations with the Teach the Web MOOC, I am trying to get a better handle on the Mozilla Popcorn Maker video tool. I’m still not convinced it is ready for prime time. Last week, I struggled with mixing multiple videos together for my introduction (told as a remix of some digital poetry videos), and then I tried to watch any number of other people’s Popcorn video intros, and sometimes the videos ran fine, sometimes it did not. There was no way to know if the darned things would load.
But I didn’t want to give up. I see that the tool has a lot of potential value, even if the reality of stability is not quite there yet for me. And then I thought: maybe I am using it wrong? Maybe I should try to use the Popcorn site for what it was first built for (if I understand it). So, I dropped an image of my band – Duke Rushmore – into the tool, and decided to make a snarky, funny, animated comic of sorts of what my bandmates and I are really thinking when we are on stage. (I got inspired by reading my son’s Mad Magazine, believe it or not).
The results were better than my earlier effort, but not without its frustrations, too. The “pop ups” — little texts that you can layer on top of videos and images — kept shifting on me, and when I finally had it down, when I looked at the published page, the texts had moved on me again. Ack. I went back and retrofitted the text bubbles, toggling between the editing screen and publishing screen to get things situated as best as I could.
I published, and the whole mess was right back again to square one. I sent out a tweet, asking for help, and left the computer. When I returned later, the published piece seemed to have fixed itself. So maybe it was a case of me being impatient with the rendering of the project.
(Added note: But now I see that the pop-ups in the embedded version (above) are off-kilter, and different from the live version. So, use the live version to see who is really talking).
As a result, I can’t see using this with students yet. If I was frustrated with Popcorn (and I do have a lot of patience with new tools and am willing to put up with a lot), my students would be nutty with it not doing what they want it to do. Which is too bad, because I like the layering of text idea, and can see some interesting ways to bring that into our discussions of media analysis and critique. I will return to Popcorn Maker at a later date, particularly as I start some planning of a summer course for high school students around digital literacies and hacking literacies (which is why I am in this MOOC project.)
For now, Popcorn holds potential, but it is not yet there yet.
Peace (in the pop),
Kevin
