Twitter Country

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Reverend

Randy Thornton, proprietor of the Metamedia blog, rocks! He recently wrote and performed his own song about Twitter called “Still tweeting 4U”. I love this kinda stuff—this is who we are, damn it! It may be a country song, but it’s all EDUPUNK in my mind: have fun, create, innovate, do. And when you bring music into this formula, whatever genre, it’s always good!

Posted in edupunk, music, twitter | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

FeedWordPress Widget: If you blog it, it is no dream

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Reverend

Less than a week after blogging my wish for a widget that would allow people to add links to their sites (no matter where they are hosted, they just need a valid feed), which in turn would be automatically entered into FeedWordPress and make the population of an aggregation site simple…it has arrived in the form of the Add Links Widget. Disco!!!

Thanks to Andre Malan and Vince Ng, who conceptualized and executed this widget beautifully, the widget works fine and I have included it three places so far:

  • And on the UMW Blogs Clubs and Organizations blog, so that any club or organization associated with UMW can drop of their link, and have their recent news show up in that blog, moreover, they will be automatically added to the Contributors list;
  • On the WPMu Ed blog I keep, so that other people that are blogging their work with WordPress Mu in education can easily contribute;
  • On the Reading Capital site so that anyone who wants to share their blog posts in a central aggregated space can do it by simply dropping off a link.

This is very cool, and they added a password option if you need to limit who can add their site. Also, the link will be held in quarantine until you approve it as a valid and relevant contribution, which will take care of the spam issues. So, in short, this solution is pretty much fully functional out-of-the-box.

Additionally, hats off to Charles Johnson (a.k.a. Rad Geek) who emailed me about the project and may be working on a more fully featured, integrated solution for the FeedWordPress plugin, but that would require our help. His plugin has become a staple of much of the syndication framework we are working through at UMW, and I really believe schools that are using and relying on a suite of plugins should strongly consider donating to the developers who create and maintain the plugins they depend on. This is a community that works because people do—and UMW, for one, should be donating more back to this community in good faith. I’m kinda getting tired of the way we are constantly crying poverty all the time as an institution, and while we are indeed poor—how much poorer would we truly be without this awesome community of developers, trouble-shooters, and full-fledged support?

Posted in rss, widgets, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Aldous Huxley on freedom, communism, technology, and the pharmacological revolution

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Reverend

Cliph Nesteroff’s blog Classic Television Showbiz is one of the great filters for YouTube on the web. He consistently puts up a ton of great clips of all sorts of gems from the golden age of television. Recently he linked to an interview between Mike Wallace and Aldous Huxley which is well worth a watch. Huxley covers an amazing amount of ground, and his subtle excitement about the “pharamocological revolution” is quite fun.

Special thanks to Peterock for reminding me how to spell Aldous 🙂

Posted in TV, YouTube | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Google My Maps with RSS

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Reverend

I have been working with Marjorie Och’s Art History seminar to build a virtual exhibit on Venice this semester, and we are using Google’s My Maps collaborative feature to have everybody add points, images, and links to one map. Today I noticed a little RSS button in the My Maps interface, which when I subscribed to gave me all the most recent points added to the maps–including the text, images, and links for each point. How very cool!

And as an added bonus, the feed even works with the CET Embed plugin for WordPress:

Update: For a thoughtful discussion of the implications of an RSS feed coming out of My Maps take a look at Tony Hirst’s post about My Maps as a geo-blogging platform back in February, 2008 (which he already hacked a version of through Yahoo pipes)—damn he is the mashup master!

[cetsEmbedRSS id=’http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie\x3dUTF8\x26hl\x3den\x26msa\x3d0\x26output\x3dgeorss\x26msid\x3d107569464170439675805.0004534214bdf7ed18f9f’ itemcount=’10’ itemauthor=’1′ itemdate=’1′ itemcontent=’1′]

Posted in rss | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

FeedWordPress: A Widget Wish

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Reverend

The whole syndication-oriented architecture (feed-frenzied learning) many have been playing with using WordPress Multi-User has been moving along pretty well for us at UMW. With the help of just a couple of plugins we have been able to generate a single feed for tags and/or categories throughout UMW Blogs (using the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin for WPMu), and we are then able to republish these sitewide feeds in any blog using FeedWordPress. Moreover, it provides us with the ability to incorporate and re-publish sites with RSS feeds that are outside the UMW Blogs environment. All very cool, EDUGLU here we come, yadda, yadda, yadda.

My wish now is to do something similar with FeedWordPress to what Andre Malan already has done for BDPRSS. Namely, create a widget extension for the FeedWordPress plugin that will allow you to have an “Add RSS” widget which provides a field on the front page of any blog so that people can add their feed (for the whole blog or a tag or category), and have the relevant posts republished. I like the fact that Andre’s extension of the BDPRSS plugin gives you levels of control over who can add the feed, and that would be a nice feature to include. Moreover, I would add sending the admin of the blog an email message to let them know someone has added a feed so that they can check it out and make sure it was added correctly and is parsing.

So, anyone else see the need for something like this? Additionally can we you build it?!

Posted in plugins, widgets, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Punk ‘n’ Pie

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Reverend

Image of PunkHats off to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematèk once again for their upcoming Punk ‘n’ Pie film series, which looks to be an amazing retrospective focusing predominantly on the UK Punk/New Wave scene (a majority of them I haven’t yet seen, and I’m particularly interested in the November 23rd double-feature). Damn, the BAM consistently puts together film programs that are so good that I find myself sometimes toying with the idea of becoming a blood sucking stock broker or a soulless real estate agent so I can simply afford to live closer to the BAM, the compromise of everything I hold dear would almost seem worth it for film programming like this. Truth be told, I will sell my soul for a good cinema experience!

I have reproduced the schedule below with selected availabel film clips and trailers for each of the films. Doing this makes the pain seem a little less depressed as I come to terms with the fact that I can’t go and see these films in a theater on glorious 35 mm with a face full of popcorn.

Breaking Glass (1980)
Fri, Nov 21 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

24 Hour Party People (2002)
Sat, Nov 22 at 4:45, 7, 9:30pm

Reggae in a Babylon (1979)
Sun, Nov 23 at 4:30, 9:15pm

Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed (1982)
Sun, Nov 23 at 2, 6:50pm

Jubilee (1977)
Wed, Nov 26 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (2007)
Thu, Nov 27 & Fri, Nov 28 at 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30pm
Trailer (Why can’t we embed this trailer—not very punk rock, eh?).

Joy Division (2007)
Sat, Nov 29 at 4:30, 9:15pm

Urgh! A Music War (1980)
Sat, Nov 29 at 2, 6:50pm
Clip from Urgh! A Music War featuring Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” (what’s up with the no embedding?)

Sid and Nancy (1986)
Sun, Nov 30 at 4:30, 9:15pm

Depeche Mode 101 (1989)
Sun, Nov 30 at 2, 6:50pm

Now, if we were to program a North American-based Punk film retrospective, what would the films be?

Here are my picks:
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979)

Times Square (1980)

The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)

Basket Case (1982)

Another State of Mind (1982)

Class of 1984 (1982)

Valley Girl (1983)

Suburbia (1984)

Repo Man (1984)

The Year Punk Broke (1991)

That’s what I have off the top of my head, what am I missing? For I’m sure there are a ton more.

Posted in edupunk, movies, music, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Langston Hughes’s “Ku Klux Klan”

Posted on November 9, 2008 by Reverend

Image of a young Langston HughesAfter reading Natalie Smith’s post on the “Audio-Video Adaptation of Hughes’s ‘The Weary Blues’”, I suddenly remembered that about a year ago, while digitizing a good amount of audio from the James Farmer archive at UMW, I had come across an unmarked tape that had over 40 minutes of Langston Hughes reading and discussing a fascinating selection of his poems. There are too many gems to list here, but I was thrilled by the unexpected discovery of such a sustained and rich series of readings. And while it’s no big secret that Hughes is a titan of American poetry, what was so cool for me about this was that I had never heard him speak before—no less read and discuss his work in such a casual and revealing way.

So, if you’re a fan of Langston Hughes, I have a little present for you: forty minutes and twenty-nine seconds of him reading and discussing a wide range of his poetry. I am not sure when this recording was made, but I imagine sometime in the 60s, but that is just a wild guess–if anyone knows more about the details of this audio file, let me know. I just wanted to get it out there before someone told me it was copyrighted 🙂 I can imagine this will prove both a compelling listen for anyone who gives it a whirel, not to mention a potentially unbelievable teaching resource. Anyway, you can find the entire audio file with all 40 minutes here:

Download Langston Hughes Reads and Discusses his poetry (40:29)

Now, if you aren’t going to get the whole thing (which you really, really should), I highly recommend listening to Langston Hughes recount his time in Washington DC during the mid 1920s, where he got his first big break by slipping Vachel Lindsay three of his poems scrawled on a napkin while working as a busboy. He then goes on to talk about the harrowing inspiration for his poem “Ku Klux Klan,” possibly my favorite of his poems. It is an inspiring, sobering, and truly powerful 4:30 minutes, and if you don’t listen to it you are a philistine of the highest order!

Download Langston Hughes discusses his career break while bussing tables, and reads his poem “Ku Klux Klan”

Posted in experimenting | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

“Mother Trucking Zombies”

Posted on November 7, 2008 by Reverend

I’ve never had as much fun delivering a presentation as I did last night while co-presenting “The Revolution Will be Syndicated” with Tom Woodward in Second Life for NMC’s Rock the Academy conference.  It was nothing short of a blast, and our guiding logic while preparing this “talk” was to make it fun and use the virtual space to our advantage. I think we came close to accomplishing both of these strategies by getting ourselves some “mother trucking zombies” (to quote Tom), some badass flamethrowers, and a heavy dose of LMS lambasting. Hats off to the NMC crew, in particular Alan, for making this possible. They bent over backwards to meet our requests for zombies, WZD (weapons of zombie destruction),  sun glasses, t-shirts, and even changing Bb advertisements. Moreover, they gave us free reign to go crazy (in spite of their organizations best interests 🙂 ).  I think this presentation was just further evidence for me that given the tools and possibilities of the web, there’s no reason to transport the tired means of communicating in these new spaces.

I mean, come on, how can setting the entire audience on fire, literally, ever be considered a failure in presentation terms?

Image by Bionicteaching (click for larger view)

Alan seemed to get a kick out of it, and given his unbelievable presenting prowess, I take that as a great compliment. I’ve included the video below (an impressive turnaround time indeed), and I hope you enjoy the madness as much as we did, although I think it would be hard to re-capture the moment that we actually experienced in Second Life at that time. And let there be no question that Brian Lamb’s (who was sorely missed last night) presentation in Second Life for NMC last Spring was the creative genesis and standard we tried to meet for this performance–not sure we got there, but it is nice to have something to aspire to.

Posted in presentations | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

The bava now with ads

Posted on November 7, 2008 by Reverend

This is a hard announcement to make, but truth be told I gotta feed my family. And while trotlining is one way to do this, the cold hard reality remains that during these dire economic times I need cash money–I gotta get paid. So in cooperation with corproate greed, the bava is running a new Ad campaign designed by the ever creative genius of the Bionicteacher.

bava ads

I’m sorry to all the bava faithful who disagree with this monetizing move–and really I don’t mean to sell out–but the money is not only good but sorely needed—believe you me. And unlike most advertising on blogs, I think of this particular campaign is one of truth and justice. Let the edtech enlightenment begin!

Posted in fun | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

UMW Blogs Support Vidoes Now Embeddable

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Reverend

A couple of months ago I promised I would take the flash videos (published as .swf files) and upload them to Blip.tv so that others could use them freely and embed them elsewhere at will.  I finally got around to doing this, and if you need some quick videos overviews for all of the tabs in the administrative backend of WordPress 2.6+ you can see all of them here. They are licensed as public domain, so rip and steal as needed.

Below is a list of the supported videos uploaded along with links to the video:

[cetsEmbedRSS id=’http://reverend.blip.tv/rss’ itemcount=’10’ itemdate=’1′ itemcontent=’0′]

Posted in UMW Blogs, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment