DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

I have a very crap myspace account. I only opened it to see how it worked etc. I don’t pay much attention to it,
But looking at it today I discovered a new link to a site which lets you load in your photos to make slide shows. It is here.

This is what I did. Display of some street art.

In the meantime Flickr has added functionality to its site letting you make collections and letting you display your images differently on your home page, like this.

Apparently, in line with modern trends to put stuff online, a funeral director (S Clarke and Son) is making his funeral services available to watch online. Rivetting stuff. . And you can see for yourself … check out the website here.

But I prefer the ultimate in multimodality on YouTube … This video has it all … sound; text; moving images, and FOOD as ART… . Here we have speed painting with chips and ketchup.

Originally uploaded by iz*source.

Oh how lovely on Valentine’s day …

But there is no need for us to forget what we are REALLY here for … the lurve of WEb 2.0

You Tube is NOT just videos of people at weddings . It is a rich resourrce for info of all kinds. Here are two useful bits about web 2.0

I really like this one:

This one is a bit less funky but a bit more controversial.

You can get a MASTERS degree without ever leaving your home!!
It is for people working in literacy education - maybe teachers; maybe advisors; maybe in the community; in a policy capacity; in learning centres … or something else.

You can do the course all purely online and it will be led by the most FUN people.
(Who can also be serious)

Details of the course here.

Go on … have a look.

You get to use web 2.0 and learn about it at the same time. You get to research things that you are doing in your own professional practice.

So, don’t you love this figure I made ? I did it here: M and Ms character creator

It is a mashup that is to say it is created from content derived from a number of sites.  You can see quite a lot of mashups on YouTube - using video spliced from lots of sources. Like  here.

It is different from culture jamming,  but could be confused with it. Culture jamming is pretty much ant advertising while many mashups are actually marketing ploys. Culture jamming transforms one media message into another like this.

Anyway how about making your own nike ad using  this mashup here.

MMMmm nice. I like this online magazine about the most ‘contagious’ ideas, gadgets and inventions… it comes out quarterly and  is really intended for people in marketing, but it’s fascinating for cultural researchers too. 

But here is a wonderful new wiki … a media literacy site perfect for teachers into new literacies and digital technology. You can simply read about new ideas, see examples of projects or be more pro-active and add to the site.

Check out the page on digital storytelling resources.

Excellent.

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.

Yep, that’s $1.6 BILLION!

For a company that has been going for 10 months and hasn’t made a profit

“YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn’t,” she said. “It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.”

Well so there you have it… social networking is THE thing … and just to think, it was in 2003 that I wrote my article about tweenies online,I ended it by saying:

The girls who use the web sites in order to communicate with others are using roles
to express themselves in a range of ways; sometimes speaking as ‘themselves’ and
sometimes as mothers or as employers (etc). Their interaction is both public and
private, conformist and rebellious and forms just a small segment of a much longer
international, historical conversation where women and girls continue to grapple with
a range of definitions of what it means to be feminine. In doing so, they form crucial
links with each other and seek above all, to stay in contact.

The article is ‘Negotiating Femininities Online’ in Gender and Education Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2004.

I am quite pleased with this as I wrote it before people were talking of Web 2.0 and ’social networking’. (It took 2 years for them to publish it as one reviewer kept it for more than a year!!)

Funny the way some people film tv programmes.
Then they upload them to Youtube.
This one here is an excerpt from a comedy called Time Trumpet.
Timetrumpet cuts and splices bits of political footage for comic effect.
In the one I have selected here we see My Little Tony and David WebCameron performing Bowie’s song ‘Changes’.

Apart from this being FUNNY I think that the whole process, which began with political speeches, followed by a filming of them and editing; followed by cutting and splicing from those films; followed by a selected clip filmed using a video camera and a tv; being uploaded to YouTube and being placed alongside other texts - amateur and professional; then I upload it to my blog.

Interesting to look at the provenance of a text as well as the text itself; and I think that digital texts frequently have a fascinating provenance as it is so easy to replicate them and put them in new contexts so that new meanings evolve.

I see that i-anya has spotted lonely gurl and she has cited Danah’s blog who writes really interestingly about this phenomenon.

What phenomenon?

The fact that a whole series of videos on youtube and an associated myspace account turn out to be a piece of art. That is to say a new form of narrative which is dispersed across spaces on the Internet.

so exciting.

Fascinating stuff and an exciting form of distributed narrative I would say.