Peter Morse's blog

IGen_2007

Peter Morse — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:54:53 +0800

iGen_2007: A mugshot of the new iGen crew 2007!
Welcome to iGeneration 2007!

We have a new gang of intrepid boggers beginning their projects next week.

Best of iGeneration 2006

Peter Morse — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:01:03 +0900

iGeneration 2006 has come to a close and the unit will not be running again until semester 2, 2007.

I thought it would be good to maintain the site with the front page showing the "best of" videoblogs by students. For security reasons we'll have to terminate access now that the new year has begun (a regrettable but unavoidable decision) - so I hope that the site will remain of interest to former students, their friends and families - not to mention academic colleagues who may be contemplating something similar. It has been enormously successful and the sense of community that developed was quite unique - fascinating to participate in - and I trust that there will now be a budding population of vloggers from the group!

So here it is: the "best of" - this is mainly my selection - informed by an informal vote that the group held in our last meeting in 2006. You'll be able to find all posts via links in the left sidebar - check out "All Video Blogs" and "All Blogs" - the next development I'm looking into is enabling links to individual student's vlogs, so that it is easier to navigate through the content - oh for a good taxonomy! Have fun

The BEST (maybe) of iGeneration 2006 (in no particular order)

The End of iGeneration 2006, Happy Holidays, and 2007!

Peter Morse — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:10:21 +0900

Clearly, iGeneration 2006 has drawn to a close - and by all accounts a highly successful and interesting course - that ran remarkably well using Drupal. I even received a $2000 grant to develop the system a bit more - not much, be enough to do a bit of work on the underlying programming and to add a few new features. What I plan to do is to migrate all the 2006 student accounts to some sort of archive and then open up a 2007 section for the new semester 2 students this year.

I'll leave the site open to former students for the time being, as there is still some enthusiasm to contribute - and we did develop a real sense of community.

Please post your Powerpoint Presentations or Other Notes for Seminars on WebCT

Peter Morse — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:54:28 +0800

Hi All,

could you please post your Powerpoint Presentations or Other Notes for Seminars on WebCT in the forum entitled "assessments." I need these for record-keeping and assessment purposes - but will get some feedback to you tomorrow which we can discuss if you wish. Hopefully this will still be useful to you as we approach the last week - remember that this site remains eternally editable, so there is always time and room to editorialise - a normal practice! As we agreed last week - everything should be completed by Monday, October 30th.

And yes! Please post your 1000-1500 word critical (self) analysis on your blog!

Cacofonix Problems -update!

Peter Morse — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 09:32:20 +0800

Problems with the server have now been fixed - so fingers crossed that everything is back to normal!

If you experience problems with the site either post a comment here or use the discussion forum on webCT.

previously:

It seems that we have been having some PHP/mySQL database problems this week that have prevented people submitting content.

Rest assured that Arts IT (and I) are onto it and we will be fixing the site by Monday or Tuesday.

Please proceed with creating your vlogs as usual, but refrain from posting until the issues have been fixed.

Peter

Todays Seminar Cancelled (week 9, 4-6pm)

Peter Morse — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:39:33 +0800

Hi All,

due to illness I'm going to have to cancel this weeks seminar - my apologies for the short notice. Regrettably no-one is available to run the seminar in my place, so we'll have to reschedule it.

Week 13 is the only remaining spot - but as we're all prepared for this week, hopefully it won't be a problem for then!

New week (week 10) is project week, so transmission will resume as normal from week 11.

I will be working upon comments and assessment feedback for your vlog proposal and first two vlog posts over the next week (when I am human again) and will email them to you individually. I'll be following the marking criteria delineated in the document on WebCT for this subject.

Posting Images

Peter Morse — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:46:48 +0800

When you post images makes SURE that you have edited them and saved them to appropriate dimensions in pixels. A very large image would be 600x400 pixels, more useful sizes would be 320x240, 240x180, 180x120, 64x64 and so on. Try and keep image dimensions (on both x and y axes) divisible by 2.

Always enter the correct dimensions in the image dimensions fields.

Otherwise, as you have just seen, the layout of the site is severely messed up! No harm done, just a lesson learnt

Technical Details on Video Submission

Peter Morse — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:52:25 +0800

Computers are stupid: they do not know who you are, if you exist or what you want to do.

You have to explain to them very accurately what you want them to do for you.

So the way everything works is based upon NAMES - the names you give to your files, and, more particularly, the pathnames that you give to them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathname).

To post your content to almost any website you need to understand what a pathname is : basically it is a Unique Address - just like your home address - that's a unique pathname that points to you in your home.

Week 6: Reminder

Peter Morse — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:53:59 +0800

Just a reminder that there will be NO seminar this week - we are moving everything back by a week. Transmission will resume to normal from next week (so we're doing our pitches NEXT week!)

Of interest: the "Peter phenomenon"

Peter Morse — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:35:51 +0800

Apropos this week's seminar, you might find it interesting to follow the "Peter phenomenon" - aka geriatric1927 (http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=geriatric1927). This raises interesting sociological aspects of vlogging, questions about demographics, and is also just a plain interesting event in the interplay between "internet celebrity," the role of the "old media," and the emergence of new forms of communities and social relations (who are perhaps hankering after that oldest and simplest of things: a familial narrative from elder members of a community.) Needless to say geriatric1927 has some very interesting things to say - worth following. Pay attention especially to the "video responses" and various spin-off videos that users have created: this is a "dialogue" in video and represents the emergence of a powerful "web2" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2) phenomenon.