Hello there! Whilst in London, I spent an afternoon with Chris Best (a former student of mine who has been teaching there ever since he graduated, and who now produces a series of podcasts about technology in teaching). We did a podcast – quite informally – about what was happening in my world and why I was in London and the like. Here is a link to go to the podcast: I am “Episode 18″. Chris and I giggled a little as we were working out how to do the podcast, but we eventually settled down and discussed the state of our respective contexts and how our work needs to develop as teachers to account for new social and discursive practices of online communities. Let me know if you have questions or comments!
Check out this workshop on social media! I like the interactive exercises embedded in it – like the “let’s make a virus” activity. I’ll be trying that some time, it’s very funny!
(I’ve been back from the UK and speaking and workshopping and podcasting and school visiting now for a few weeks but landed right back into another busy semester – hopefully regular blogging will resume soon)
I’ve spoken a lot in my work before about fan fiction and the potential it has for transformative, subversive social and political commentary on narrative discourse and ‘D’iscourse. Above is a remix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight (with a little bit of Harry Potter thrown in for good measure) used to “hack” pop culture and make various tropes and discourses transparent. The creator explains:
In this remixed narrative, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes some of the more patriarchal gender roles and sexist Hollywood tropes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways.
I think this is very clever and I’m keen to use it with my students to illustrate aspects of digital culture and transformative works.
Here are two articles about the use of wikis in education:
I had been using blogs for several years until last year when i went a bit wiki crazy and everything was all about the wiki. I am quite liking nings too but haven’t ever used those yet with a group. I need to give the wiki more robust experimentation as I don’t think I am getting the most of them yet. So semester 2 students, you’d best learn all you can about wikis in advance because we’ll be using them!
I already use gmail as my email of choice because of its functionality. And I love using google docs for collaborative writing. But now I’m very excited to watch this forthcoming development “google wave” – I can’t wait to play with it!
I have more digital fiction and multimedia authoring classes coming up so I’ve been playing some more with xtranormal – it seems one of the simplest 3D storytelling / video making tools around – the most effect for the least effort! The choices are limited for free accounts, and I’m not sure how much modding is possible, but for a simple introduction to 3D multimedia storytelling, film techniques, and so on, I’d definitely recommend this as a nice easy starting point.
I accumulated hundreds of stop motion animation examples during my research about DIY Stop motion trends, practices and literacies. I couldn’t use all of them (as it was I think my 20 screenshots might have been overdoing it for the publishers), but here is one of my favourites on youtube from a recently graduated arts student from the Netherlands who has won a ton of awards for her work – watch and you’ll see why!
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was being interviewed (by William) for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. I was hunting through previous interviews to understand the expectations and genre for an interviewee when I came across a great interview with Paul Marino about Machinima. I liked the discussion of gender in particular. The last part of the interview is Paul outlining what he proposes a potential machinima canon, where he offers 6 examples that showcase historical and technically diverse films. One of them is the Snow Witch (2007).
This Japanese ghost story is adapted from Hearn’s “Yuki-Onna” (Kwaidan)
This one uses a known story and adapts it to machinima form.
Another of his 6 examples is The Photographer (2006).
A lone photographer is searching for his subject through the crowded city. Filmmaker Friedrich Kirschner mixes various media elements in his machinima, thus emphasizing that the medium not only can be devoid of game assets but also can break free of its commonly known framework.
I love this one because of its artistry, and because you don’t need to be an insider of the gaming culture to appreciate it.
Yet there are some Second Life machinima which I think I appreciate most of all (which don’t make Marino’s canon suggestions) precisely because I am an insider and I “get” the pathos or the humour at a much deeper level. Robbie Dingo’s Better Life (2006) is one I cite all the time:
and of course, I always mention the one in which I was the leading lady, Lip Flap (2006):
Lip Flap has had almost 10,000 views, The Snow Witch has had about 60,000, and Better Life has had about 80,000. Nothing really in comparison to the other machinima I quote a lot which has had over 1.6 million views (!), the first episode of Red vs Blue (2003):
What machinimas would you add to a proposed machinima canon?
I’ve been a huge fan of stop motion animation since I was little and didn’t even know what it was called – do you remember seeing the operatic orange on Sesame Street?
Later when I took photography as an optional course at University I worked with a friend and classmate to make two stop motion movies. One was a melodramatic soap opera of a banana sacrificing itself to become a banana smoothie and the other was using the giant chess pieces in a local park to create a love / war film noir-ish drama (just imagine the image below coming to life!). If only we’d had the resources and technology and sharing opportunities then that are available today!
I’ve been doing research on DIY / amateur / classroom practices around stop motion animation for a book chapter and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed discovering all sorts of talented people (even 3 year olds!) participating and sharing their work. Some of the latest trends are amazing, awe-inspiring, exciting, and very clever. You’ll have to stay tuned for the publication details but here is a sneak preview of one I found just plain funny:
The ancient Greek fishing village of Eleusis suffers since the Goddess Demeter cursed the land.
Graveyards are filled with freshly dug graves for the weak and the young who could not struggle any longer, their poor bodies giving up all heat after experiencing the first Winter known to mankind.
Graveside vigils are kept to protect the souls of loved ones until it is time to meet Charon, who ferrys them across the river and to the entrance of the Underworld. Safe passage requires a coin, but with the village in crisis, all coins have gone to the temple as offerings to Hera and Demeter, to remove the curse.
But some are too spent to pray, they simply lie on the grave with misguided notions that their body warmth can be exchanges. The epitaphs they’ve written a verbal reminder of how Demeter directly caused her young child’s life to expire.
How can these people’s dire grief be lifted? Perhaps never. But perhaps you – you YOU – would like to enter the world with me and try to help?
If you are interested in online role-play for educational purposes, please let me know! I’ll be organising some workshops in the second half of the year if I can find SL educators who are interested in taking part.
Today I gave a tour of Macbeth for the HUMlab in Sweden! Click here if you’d like to view the video stream of the tour. It goes for about an hour. It was a bit of an experiment for us to do the live streaming, but it mostly worked well, except an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction in which I lost my hair! Thanks to Jim Barrett for the invitation to speak and for doing all the camera work.
For those occasions when I have a presentation about Virtual Macbeth where Second Life is not accessible for a live demonstration, I’ve resorted to using these slides. I’ll record an audio version or maybe there will be a machinima version coming soon.
Artiste extraordinaire Beth (Stella Costello) created this statue to symbolise the sense of loss experienced by the people inside this story. Why is she broken? Whose loss? Which people are torn apart?
For my poetry class today we’re looking at all different kinds of starting points for stimulating poetry writing in the classroom. Here are some musical themes which could be used to evoke imagery and promote the poetic.
(Oxygene)
(Prologue)
(Hecate)
and here is a clip or two containing some interesting sounds:
Part of my Greek myth build is completed now! Here’s an image of the graveyard, where participants will tell and write stories in role. I’m going to also ask experienced students to make personifications of grief – I did a rather non-metaphorical example of a person expressing grief here:
I have to confess I bought a “basic mannequins prim” set online and just positioned each prim to make this statue. I think the set is a great bridge for non builders (like me!) to start using the tools more creatively. It only took me an hour, and I have zero building skills. There was a full permissions set available so that means I can give copies of the set to all my students and send them off on a task. It really focusses attention on the body, and is a reminder that the body can be and is present in an online drama and role-playing session in all sorts of ways.
For my Swedish colleagues at HUMlab, Umea University, I am giving a seminar on May 8th! See details below:
Seminarium om Macbeth och virtuella världar – i HUMlab och i Second Life
Angela Thomas från University of Sydney kommer den 8 maj kl 11 att tala om “Inside the mind of Macbeth: Understanding and interpreting literary worlds in a virtual environment” i HUMlab. Tillsammans med studenter har hon arbetat med en omfattande gestaltning av Macbeth i en virtuell värld inom ramen för det uppmärksammade Virtual Macbeth-projektet.
Thomas genomför seminariet i Second Life (ifrån Australien) och kommer där att visa upp det virtuella Macbeth. Allt detta visas på stor skärm i HUMlab inför seminariedeltagarna i labbet. Angela Thomas är bland annat känd för sin bok Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age (Peter Lang, 2007).
This week in my children’s literature class we finished a drama we started last week using Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival”. My purpose when doing drama with students is to showcase as many drama and theatre techniques as possible that teachers can use to investigate a literary text, whilst maintaining the integrity of the literary context of course. In this week’s session we were engaged in improvised roleplay, teacher in role, writing in role, gestural experimentation, storytelling, drawing in role and suitcase theatre. It involved creating a narrative arc within the drama elements using context-building, poetic, reflective and narrative action elements. After years of research both in my MEd and PhD and beyond, I am genuinely convinced that role-play is one of the most effective teaching strategies ever to have been developed. Unfortunately it is still underused a lot by teachers! Hopefully my students are the kind who will step outside their comfort zone and be creative with their own classes.
Again, thanks to Corwin, I visited a new art installation by AM Radio. The info details about the work include the following notecard:
AM Radio’s The Red and The Wild
IDIA is pleased to host artist AM Radio as the inaugural artist-in-residence at IDIA Labs – an exhibtion and installation sim for virtual installation art and performance.
THE INSTITUTE FOR DIGITAL INTERMEDIA ARTS is a hybrid art and design studio established as part of the Center for Media Design at Ball State University and funded the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The institute is an interdisciplinary research and design environment that explores the intersections between arts and technology. Students, faculty, staff and industry partners engage the discourse of emergent media design on projects employing virtual reality, visualization, simulation and human computer interface in this project-based immersive learning center.
http://idiarts.org
As always, AM Radio enjoys exploiting the SL space and creating art that is on the one hand familiar, yet on the other hand is very surreal. Here is another photo:
Corwin has been teaching a virtual photography group and taught me how to make a wireframe view today, so here’s another photo from the installation, this time converted to wireframe -
Second Life offers so much potential for creativity, and I’m always learning and experiencing new examples of that. Thanks Corwin!
I am a senior lecturer in English and Arts Education. In 2009 I am involved in research about 3D multimedia authoring, literary spaces in virtual worlds, and innovative virtual worlds pedagogy. I am teaching new media literature and literacies, children's literature, drama, and introductory courses in the use of virtual worlds in education. I am also interested in issues of identity, feminist media studies, and multimodal semiotics.
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