“What we do with WordPress echoes in eternity!”

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Reverend

Well, maybe not eternity, but certainly beyond graduation! šŸ™‚

Mike Caulfield, my new favorite blogger, has been talking about the value of having students work with a web-based authoring platform that they can actually use after they graduate:

And because the students worked with real tools (and possibly even on real problems) they’d graduate with bankable skills rather than detailed knowledge of how to use an LMS that has no analogue in the outside world. [Read entire post here.]

“Amen,” says the reverend. To further demonstrate Mike’s point through some anecdotal data (my favorite kind!), I recently got the following e-mail from Rebecca Parsons (reproduced with her permission), who was one of the stellar students who worked on the Literary Journal Nonce:

I hope you’re having a great summer! I’ve moved to ******** for the summer and am continuing an internship I was doing with Greg Stanton on a conference he’s planning (and that I get to go to!). I made a new website for them (www.genocidescholars.org) and blog (genocidescholars.org/blog) and wordpress has entered my life in a new forum! Unfortunately, I have a problem that didn’t come up with Nonce, so I’m not sure what to do and was wondering if you could help me with it. .. I have to paste in a 97 page document which has a lot of foreign characters in it. If it were shorter, I’d just go through and take them all out, but it’d be almost impossible with this. Right now, wordpress will not accept the text at all. Is there an easy way or plugin to fix this? I did a search in the support forums but didn’t find too much. I’d be really grateful for any help you can give!

The solution was simple, as all things with WordPress are, but more importantly Rebecca is now using WordPress to help organize a scholarly conference dealing with the issue of genocide in more recent instantiations like Darfur and Yugoslavia. Not only does this suggest that we are giving students a valuable experience that they can take with them as they enter “different forums,” as she puts it so wonderfully. But, in this case, it illustrates that because this tool is so malleable for publishing content, RSS ready out-of-the-box, and search engine friendly -a whole lot of people beyond the conference participants may have access to scholarly resources about a global issue as urgently critical as genocide. Good for you, Rebecca, and not just because you are using WordPress (could she have used Drupal as easily? Maybe, though my guess would be no), but because you are using a web-based publishing platform to do life’s work and get invaluable information out to the public about contemporary atrocities committed on a daily basis.

Posted in wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , | 11 Comments

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Reverend

I am a crass, yet lovable, smuggler wanted by bounty hunters from several systems…

Solo

Which Star Wars character are you? Take the test here.

Posted in star wars | 4 Comments

De-animator 4 life!!!

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Reverend

De-animator 612

I think a huge shout-out is in order for Chris, who has taken the de-animator game play to another level. I recently blogged about de-animator, but, in short, a post I threw out over 6 months ago that is far and away the most consistently popular destination on this blog. The original post was just a quick description and link to a fun flash game called the de-animator (if you haven’t played it yet, you should!). And if you do play it, just think about what it might take to get to level 30 with a score of 612 -the previous high score was Kayz’s at 206 (and an undocumented claim of 255 by Timmy). Kayz -if you are listening- is 612 off the charts or what?

I just want to say you both rock! This de-animator post has been about the longest, sustained source of fun I have had with bavatuesdays. And while I spend countless hours thinking and writing about educational tech, movies, teaching, etc., a simple flash video game has brought me in contact with a different community of gamers who take pride in their skillz. It is extremely rewarding for me that the bava has provided a makeshift space for a small distributed community to enjoy their shared passion of videogames. I think this simple post may offer an interesting anecdote for the relevance of video games. But, it may not -either way the most important thing is that it has pushed me out of retirement and back into the de-animator ring! I begin a serious training regiment tomorrow morning at 4 am and I will – I repeat- I WILL reclaim my crown from the new, reigning, heavy-weight champion of the de-animator world: CHRIS!!!!! . Enjoy this sweet victory while it lasts, Chris, I’m coming for you šŸ™‚

In all seriousness, can anyone ever beat 612?! That may very well be the pinnacle of de-animator scores, equivalent to turning over Pac-Man or something.

Posted in video games | Tagged , | 9 Comments

“We aint one-at-a-timin’ here, we’re mass communicatin’!”

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Reverend

Well, if you don’t know the quote from O Brother, Where art thou? it is worth a listen for it speaks to what exactly we’re doing over at ELS Blogs -this project ain’t no one off -this is the whole kit and kaboodle in one simply complex install!

We are getting ready to build a more extensive WPMu installation for UMW that touches many departments throughout the campus that will be starting with many of the Freshman Seminars for the Fall and Spring semesters -but by no means limited to these seminars. That being said, I have been using the last couple of weeks to experiment more extensively with WordPress Multi-User, something I enjoy tremendously. It was nice to discover that there are a lot of cool new options, plugins and theme packs (see this post for more on themes) that I will be blogging about in the near future. But right now I want to focus in particular on the aggregating possibilities that are beginning to emerge in WPMu.

WP-Autoblog has been around for single-installations of WordPress for a while now which does a nice job of aggregating content into blog posts from various feeds around the web -much like WP-o-Matic discussed here. I like WP-o-Matic a lot because it uses SimplePie parsing that does an excellent job with images and other objects, while being relatively feed agnostic. Unfortunately, WP-o-Matic is not compatible with WPMu just yet. WP-Autoblog, on the other hand, has been made to play nice with WPMu (get the WPMu version of this plugin here) and it is a really dead simple interface that allows for an easy cut and paste approach to including feeds. So, I got to thinking a couple of things:

  • What about taking all the feeds from ELS Blogs and putting them into a WP-Autoblog blog -you can see an example of this up and running here. What WP-Autoblog provides is a site wide aggregator in the guise of a K2-themed blog (although you have 66 other themes to choose from on ELS Blogs) that is capturing all the content from around the environment. Simple enough to do and yet another way to capture and re-present all the rich content that is coming in over the wires, or is it tubes?
  • OK, so now we have this plugin that pretty much anyone with a blog on ELS Blogs can use to create an aggregator of feeds within a blog (with these feeds themed to their preference). Hmmm, so does this mean that professors and their ilk can create their own aggregator blog by asking students to record their blog’s RSS feeds in something like wiki, google docs, spreadsheet, or what have you? It is a quick and easy way to locate content in one specific blog that may give folks who come across a blog like this an interesting and different visualization of a group of posts in relationship to one another within the context of a “class blog,” which is quite distinct from the logic that will emerge on an individual student blog. We have experimented with aggregation like this already here, but it wasn’t something anyone in the environment could do by simply activating a plug-in and copying and pasting feeds. And while I like this aggregation space referenced (find out how the two plugins BDP RSS and Optimal were used to create this space here) it requires a small php hack which is impossible for general users on WPMu. So rather than hacking around these limitations, the idea here is to make it simple in order to multiply the ways people can access content and map relationships within various contexts.
  • Last, and by no means least, the best way at cross-pollinating student content within a specific class as well as throughout the entire ELS Blogs environment might be to create these little blog aggregators (and remember that anyone on the system has access to this plugin -a splog nightmare if you aren’t careful) in order to syndicate sites they are reading and highlight content that they are interested in. The genius here is that content becomes re-purposed and propagated throughout an environment (sometimes redundantly) with the idea that you create myriad possibilities for serendipity by republishing content in various spaces throughout this distributed collection of blogs.

I’m pretty excited about this because I think it offers a quick, easy and informal way for users, profs and students alike, to create spontaneous collections of feed-driven content that will in turn populate blogs throughout the community, potentially giving rise to a certain amount of content chaos that may ultimately result in a new way of avoiding the “one-at-a-timin’ [Aggregator and single WordPress installs in relative isolation] so that we can work towards mass communicatin’ [throughout campus]” the web for one another on a more regular basis within a specific environment.

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? The Horror Movie Trailer

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Reverend

Just found this mashup on YouTube remixing a trailer for O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a horror movie. All too chillingly convincing…

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

The War comes to Campus

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Reverend

Im age of the War Effort at Mary Washington

Yesterday was a surreal day at the University of Mary Washington. What seemed to be just another languid and steamy Summer day turned out to be a brutal reminder of the War in Iraq. UMW was the setting for hundreds of National Guardsmen and women who were saying goodbye to their families and friends as they prepared to ship out for a 400 day tour. For many of these soldiers it was their second stint in the Middle East, and it really pierced the languid and insular aura of this manicured Liberal Arts college -in many ways the picture perfect campus. A haunting reminder that troops are still deploying en masse around the country, and that there is no end in sight to the madness in Iraq. I really hope everyone of the soldiers that I rubbed shoulders with yesterday, who were waiting patiently waiting in and around the air-conditioned Combs Hall for their bus to leave, returns home safe and sound very soon. And for the rest of us, I hope it is a stark reminder that we are a nation at war, and we have both the obligation and the right to voice our feelings -but let us never conflate the fate of the individual with a particular government’s “scalable” vision of demoncracy. Read more about the war coming home to Fredericksburg here.

Tagged | 2 Comments

bavarchive: creating learning resources on Flickr

Posted on June 25, 2007 by Reverend

Mario Bava: The Baron of Blood

Some of my most treasured “possessions” are the film programs I have collected from innumerable film outings over the years. I have a modest collection of stuff spread across several boxes in my attic, and I do love to steal away for a while and look through these memories that encapsulate so many of my fondest memories. Film is first and foremost a memory machine for me. It helps me track moments in my own development and re-project my own understanding of days gone by, however filtered and fallible. But I think we all know that the emulsion of memories is a less than perfect science!

That being said, I was looking through my Brooklyn Academy of Music programs from about 2002 through 2005 and I was further reminded of just how amazing the programming at the BAM is. You wanna know what makes a great city? Just take a look at a cultural center like the BAM which consistently delivers some of the most unbelievable access to the culture of film (not to mention theater, dance and music) within a sharp international frame. I just can say enough amazing things about the level of culture that a place like the BAM brings to a city. I think in the midst of developing our consumer inspired nightmares such as the ubiquitous strip malls, box stores, and cineplexes, we have forgotten the very reasons why we were put on this earth. It is certainly not simply to mate, feed our basic instinct, or shop ’til we drop -we were meant to create and watch films, movies, motion pictures, what have you. Three thousand years of culture led us to this moment, and the second we forget it -that is when we return to the primal ooze and cease to be imaginative figures of mirrors and light.

Ok, but that is not why I am writing this post, rather I am experimenting a bit with cleaning out my attic and sharing some of my experiences that are deeply personal, while at the same time unbelievable guides to a curriculum (self-directed or otherwise) for film, or even valuable for fueling ideas for incorporating film into various disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning). To this end, I have created a flickr account for bavatuesdays (distinct from my personal account which is just a baby fest) that will act as an archive for all of the various sediments of my short and feeble history as a collector of film programs. If I go through them too quickly, I might have to bust out my Weebles’ Haunted House or my comprehensive Smurf collection or even all my AD&D paraphernalia šŸ˜‰ But, I’ll start with the stuff that I think might prove useful to anyone already interested in film, or particularly interested in getting an education in film.

The first series of sets I will work on getting up, and possibly the most robust sets I have, are the BAM’s bi-monthly film programs. I have many, many more from my years in both NYC and LA, but none of them are as comprehensive as my BAM collection. What I particularly love about the programming of the BAM is that within a single day, or across a series of days you might have access to a film like Mario Bava’s Black Sunday followed by a classic of French New Wave cinema, or a little know b-movie from the Nigerian film industry (currently the largest in the world!). The programming makes connections by juxtaposing unlikely relationship that force you to think about film in all sorts of exciting ways. I could go on forever about the genius that is the BAM’s Rose Cinema, but I’ll stop there for now.

Here is my description of the first set on Flickr titled “BAM Film Programming:”

This is a set of film programs from the Brooklyn Academy of Music in NYC. The BAM has one of the most impressive film programming in existence. The monthly calendars included in this set reflective the thoughtful conceptualization of film that may very well suggest the most intelligent range of thinking film in all sorts of amazingly complex and interesting ways. I think of this sets as a learning resource for the student of film. A guide with which to approach and unbelievable cool and varied selection of great films.

(Link.)

And you will not be surprised to find out that as of now there is only the “Mario Bava: The Barron of Blood” retrospective that may have very well been the most enjoyable and exciting experience I have ever had (outside fathering, husbanding, Star Wars, yadda, yadda, yadda -you know the drill). I plan on scanning and uploading this stuff on a somewhat regular basis and blogging it in order to not only capture the experience for me, but also to give my own ideas about why these combinations may prove generative. More importantly, I think the folks who have programmed these retrospectives at BAM are in many ways re-framing a whole theoretical model for looking at film, and it may be worthwhile to spend some time exploring that.

Mario Bava: The Barron of Blood

Posted in film | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Flickr blog is powered by WordPress.com, who knew?

Posted on June 25, 2007 by Reverend

Flickr blog powered by WordPress.com

Did anyone else notice that the official Flickr blog is hosted by WordPress.com? Perhaps not a groundbreaking discovery, nor particularly profound. Yet, it is reassuring to see Yahoo and the folks at Flickr using an open source, hosted solution like WordPress.com to handle their major press releases.

Go WordPress, get busy, it’s your birthday…

Pathetic, I know.

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged | 3 Comments

The “effa bee eye” may be coming to a campus near you

Posted on June 24, 2007 by Reverend

The Thing Movie PosterAccording to the Press Esc blog the FBI is offering to brief universities on how to identify an international spy on campus, here are some of the indicators listed:

Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators.

Save for the unexplained affluence, I’m a serious target on every count. In fact, I have even gone so far as to hole up with a foreign national. This list goes to show the way in which draconian abstraction makes everyone a potential threat. It’s just like John Carpenter’s The Thing, pretty soon we’ll be doing blood tests with blow torches to separate the “aliens” from the “red-blooded Americans.”

On a much more important level, the U.S. has benefited tremendously from the influx of international students who bring new ideas, ways of reading, and imagining to our campuses. How many of these students, to the detriment of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., will be far more willing to take their talents to Canada, Mexico, Europe, China, or some other nation that doesn’t treat everyone with a foreign passport as a potential on-campus spy. Additionally, how does this affect the rest of US culture? Where would US film history be without the influx during the 1930s and 40s of so many brilliant European filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lange, or acting giants like Peter Lorre, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Ironically, these unequaled giants of Hollywood were fleeing the horrific realities of Nazi Germany? How many people know that Thomas Mann wrote Doctor Faustus in Los Angeles? Or that Bertolt Brecht had to flee the U.S. soon after the end of World War II because of suspicions that he was a spy for the communists (he was called to testify before HUAC in 1947 and was blacklisted)? Paranoid isolationism kills the powerful possibility of a variegated and multivalent imagination and decimates a culture’s very vitality. I’ll quote the princess who I love so dearly for her fearlessness in speaking out against the excesses of Empire, “The tighter you clench your first, the more star systems will slip between your fingers.”

Tagged , , | 6 Comments

China Tracy & Second Life at the Venice Biennale

Posted on June 21, 2007 by Reverend

china_tracy

Marjorie Och, a Web 2.0 compliant Art Historian here at UMW, recently returned from the Venice Biennale. Better yet, she returned excited about technology and baring gifts! One of the exhibits at the Biennale (the premiere international contemporary art exposition) was a Second Life installation by an artist (or group of artists?) who goes by the name of China Tracy (here’s a description from the booklet Marjorie gave us). Now, as I alluded to briefly, I’m not certain whether China Tracy is simply an artist exploring Second Life as the booklet seems to suggest, or rather a team of artists fashioning a documented experience of this metaverse through photography and machinima video. I am fairly certain its the later given the infrastructure surrounding the project, but I may very well be wrong. The brochure is pretty interesting, it contains some images of their spaces, several pages of a film-like strip of photos from their explorations in Second Life. It also contains their contains their online Urbanization plans, as well as the brilliantly phrased Neo Existential Manifesto -unfortunately this part of the booklet is written entirely in Chinese.

Now all of this is coming from a guy whose excitement in regards to Second Life has waned considerably up and until Alan Levine demonstrated the imminent possibility of live voice chat at Faculty Academy. And given our UMW’s new relationship with NMC, perhaps its time we built something cool like a bitchin’ Mashup Multiplex! particularly since the idea of contemporary movement of Chinese artists in Second Life is very intriguing for me. If China Tracy has you interested that are many more resources to choose from below.

Also, Wagner James Au’s New World Notes has been all over this. He has had two posts on China Tracy here and here.

Below are some machinima videos in Second Life by China Tracy, the first is the opening of the China Tracy Pavilion for the Venice Biennale.

The following three are a sequential series of videos that, quoting Wagner James Au:

China Tracy’s art project mentioned here recently hit the SL machinima stream, and it’s beautiful, meditative, sometimes sardonic, but ultimately moving and hopeful. As a movie, you may see the influence of Wong Kar-Wai and Wim Wenders, among other world class directors. Nearly a half hour in total length, it plays out in three separate but thematically-related parts. Part I is an introductory montage to Second Life, and it lingers on both the beauty and the excesses of virtual capitalism that also make the metaverse a consumerist sprawl.

Here are the links to all three videos.
China Tracy: i.Mirror Part 1
China Tracy: i.Mirror Part 2
China Tracy: i.Mirror Part 3

Finally, Marjorie Och also mentioned, dare I say raved about, the work of the Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who is “[an] electronic artist, [who] develops large-scale interactive installations in public space, usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces.” from what was described to me, this artists installations sounded simply amazing. I’m gonna do my homework, talk some more with Marjorie, and see what I can come up with, for I personally love installation art when it is totally off-the-wall -and from what little I understand this artist was not only out of this world, but also one of the biggest highlights of the Biennale. Exciting stuff!

Posted in video, YouTube | Tagged , , | 2 Comments