DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

Blue is the color of night
When the red sun
Disappears from the sky
Raven feathers shiny and black
A touch of blue glistening down her back
We don’t talk about heaven and we don’t talk about hell
We come to depend on one another so damn well
So go to confession whatever gets you through
You can count your blessings I’ll just count on blue

Lucinda Williams
TT is brilliant. This is from his photostream on Flickr.

Listen here.

is where I went at the weekend.

An installation bt Anthony Gormley called ‘Another Place’.

It was VERY windy.

I took this photo for Guy:

He likes prints.

I understand (from watching trash films) that sometimes private detectives look through other people’s bins to find out stuff.

Well today I decided to do something similar. To look through my own email trash can to see if I could find out anything about myself.

We could see it as a bt of self-psycho-analysis. (Freud would have a good day with that concept.)

Aaaanyway, I found in my bin a number of emails from people I don’t know. This first one is from Adam Burt (thanks Adam) who sent me a link to his blog telling me how to podcast onto my blog using a photocopier… YES REALLY. Look here at the video.

I had an email from someone else who I never heard of and it had a link to his blog. The blog had a blog post with a hilarious video of some girl dancing.

I had gerzillions of emails about blogging in secondary schools - so much so that my inbox went nto the SCARY RED ZONE.

An extract of the mail is this:

We have 300 children in school. Up until this year it has really only
been my class who blogged although I did some whole-class-blogging
with younger children.
This session we are trying 2 children from each of our 2 primary 6
and 2 primary 7 classes being bloggers each day. This should mean
each child in these classes blogs every couple of weeks or so. Mainly
just writing about what they have learned, the quality of the posts
is variable, but hopefully will improve as the children get the hang
of the tech and can focus on learning

The person said they use this software.

Oh and then there was all the mail about ethics reviews which I chucked … after doing the reviews of course. But what if someone finds that trash??

In one of the emails labelled

SPAM

If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed…
…Oh, wait a minute, he already does.

Actually, on second thoughts, it is really BORING going through my own trash can.

Ok, so now the analysis…
I found out this about me … I get a lot of emails. I deleted 80 today, which is a bout avearage. I don’t read about half of what I delete. And some of it, I now see, is QUITE interesting but I just don’t have enough time to read it all.

And finally …. nearly in my trash can is an email from someone I do not know, asking for advice on who to have as her referees when she applies to another university to get on a teaching course (????!!!) Weird. The e mail is full of spelling errors. She has also sent me her personal statement to look through. I don’t know her and this is CRAZY!! But I am going to help her.

And finally.
Guess where I went at the weekend .

Sadly it is yet again the time of year when the British Nation is force fed 1970s style crap entertainment in a bid to get them to cough up dough for ‘Children in Need’.

The idea is to induce an overwhelming sense of pity and to foster the idea that children (soon to be adults) can only survive if other people are kind enough.

Hear it from disability nation.

And I am pretty much loving the piss on pity approach on these T shirts. It is definitely worth browsing through this site.

The BBC tv programme Children in Need has been running annually for 24 years. That is a heartsinking number of crap tv programmes the nation has had to endure. Its mascot is a teddy bear, ‘Pudsey’ which has a patch over one eye. (Poor Pudsey has a bad eye.)

Pudsey’s time is definitely up.

Thanks to Zombizi for the links. (He has been making bad situations worse, since 1963).

And finally … doesn’t this woman know that you can get loyalty points if you use your own bags in Tesco now?

…. is the work of Sigrd Norris.

What a SENSATION she is!!

The lovely Roberta Taylor recommended Sigrid’s work to me and I will be EATING up her book: Analyzing Multimodal Interaction.

We learned from Halliday that language is the model from which we deduce grammar; Norris is doing this with multimodal communication.

I think that we need to respond to meanings and analyse where those meanings come from in order to work out what the grammar is. Norris’s work takes us through SLOWLY and carefully how to do just that.

This is the book to read.

Just trying to keep up with litrate, I am blogging from the train - the London to Doncaster at 14.10.

The trip here took in an exhibition at The Barbican, The Photographers Gallery, The National Portrait and the V and A exhibition of twilight photography I really liked the di corcia stuff the best.

Really really good all of these - and in addtion to that saw Lucinda Williams at Shepherd’s Bush.
Just fabulous. What a great break it has been - and managed to see some good stuff to photograph as we made our way between exhibitions. How lucky am I?

It is great to see that the spirit of the Information Commons is still alive and kicking, seeing the launch last week of the Open Learning resource bank online.

This seems extremely generous hearted and is most timely, co-inciding with the development of Sheffield’s new MA in New Literacies, launching in October 2007.

I will be interested in looking in more detail at the unit on the use of digital video for Media Studies type work in schools.

Also of great interest is the one on Reading visual images which is JUST the ticket.

So boing boing have a piece about Flickr trying to patent interestingness.

Hmm well that is interestingness in itself because I have been noticing the number of photosharing sites that are around and that are copying bits of Flickr (as well as having some new ideas). It is obviously getting to Flickr.
Also it seems, that Boing Boing, according to their report don’t thing that interestingness is very original.
however there are many debates on Flickr by members about how on earth the algorithm works and it clearly is something that matters to people.
So I reckon it is worth cash.

And funnily enough THIS one crept into explore the other day:

And the very cool thing is that I did not see anyone take this at the same time

Some people are getting all excited about ZOOMR
This is a fabulous new photosharing site which is much much speedier (zoomier) than Flickr.

I think Flickr peeps may be scared, especially as so much stuff from Flickr is duplicated here. And it is multilingual.

But I am not sure that a move away from Flickr would be worth it as I would now want to leave all my lovely new friends behind.
I also cannot see any real interactivity happening on Zoomr yet…. but it is like a school disco I spose … everyone else is wondering who will dance first.
At the moment everyone is still standing round the walls.

I joined to check it out and here is one of my photos … just to be a rebel it is a shot of someone on a recent Sheffield Flickrmeet!!

Flickr meet Hosted on Zooomr

Meanwhile ianya tells us all about mediaed.org
Here you can get all sorts of info and resources as well as free video downloads.

For example the one from Bel hooks in New York.

An interesting mix of promo videos (to entice you to buy videos) and pdf downloads, the site offers a mix of takes on media education issues. … so I am not quite so keen on the message in this video here that advertsing is propaganda…

Quite a goldmine anyway for anyone thinking of running an online course soon….

Thanks for the tip off anya!!