Beats some modern day counting books for kids 
Tag Archives: youtube
Lonelygirl15 dies, Kate Modern becomes International spinoff
I’ve been completely snowed under this past month with lots of extra teaching (that’s the fun part) and literally hundreds of papers to grade (definitely not so fun). But I managed to take a break today and catch up a little…
only to discover I missed the dying hours of Lonelygirl15 in the season finale:
Of course, the conspiracy theorists say that she isn’t really dead…
And the latest spin-off to appear using the same writers is Kate Modern, starring an Australian girl located in London.
I’ll be following the commentary with interest whenever I get the chance.
Where New Media and Old Media Collide
Australian YouTube star TheHill88 and Channel 7 television program Today Tonight do something together to do with Australian tourism… not quite sure what – but here is Caitlin’s YouTube version. Stay tuned for the TV version when hopefully all will be revealed. I like the koala hug!
My Digital Fiction Presentation for Futures in Literacy Conference
The Cross-Media Self
Yesterday when I added Andy Piper as a friend on Facebook, I flippantly said “now we’re friends everywhere” – since I knew him on Second Life, on Facebook, on twitter, on flickr, on his blog, and through his comments on my blog.
He paused for a while, then replied with a wide ASCII grin:
“friends *everywhere*?
see http://onxiam.com/people/andypiper“
I clicked the link, and my jaw literally dropped in astonishment at the number of tracks Andy makes across the web. How the HECK can any one person do so much?!?!
Right now I feel pretty overwhelmed by the number of social media spaces I seem to exist in: 3 blogs, 3 or 4 roleplaying forums, a fan forum, a zine, flickr, linkedin, twitter, facebook, Second Life (plus an alt), 2 youtube accounts, gmail, work mail, skype, google chat. People keep inviting me to new things but I just don’t have the time! And each one of these has channels or groups or threads – I am in 63 flickr groups, 19 facebook groups, subscribe to numerous blog feeds, several podcasts and a number of youtube channels. I’m part of 2 high traffic email lists (Association of Internet Researchers and Second Life Education), and about 10 low to medium traffic ones.
My solution at handling them all is to concentrate on two or three at a time. The amount of reading and writing and uploading and downloading and viewing and clicking I do every day is becoming ridiculous. I am a terrible commenter on friend’s blogs, I only blog once every day or two, I barely post to email groups, and I only keep up with urgent emails. If I tried to fully engage in everything I wouldn’t ever get any work done!
Andy wrote a post about his experiences called The Quicksand of Web 2.0, in which he debates some of the pros and cons of different applications and talks about addiction and his “off switch”.
Its all left me wondering about the kind of identity play we engage in across all of these different spaces we inhabit, and the type of narrative constructions other people are making about us as they make connections between our multiple cross-media selves.
And is it possible for people who read your work across these spaces to suddenly get turned off by a bad case of TMI (too much information)? Or as one of my literary colleagues is wont to say, “that person just has too much narrative going on.”
But not you Andy
Australian Politicians Catching Up to the YouTube Campaigning Practices of their US Counterparts
“John Howard pops up in cyberspace to prove that he has caught up the the 21st century” explains some news reporter on the News today.
Malcom Turnbull has a Facebook site and his friends seem to love this photo he posted:
Meanwhile Peter Garret from the Labour party argued back against the PM’s climate change policy with this:
and the party called him out with this:
I think we’re all waiting to see this though – when are our politicians going to really become twisted, repurposed, and memed all over the internet?
As said on one news report this evening, “we’ve got a long way to go if we want to use the same political tactics as the Americans!” – the Obama Girls:
Robbie Dingo’s “Watch the World” machinima
Wow! Robbie Dingo created the most amazing 3D version of Van Gogh’s painting, and it is shown in this time lapse machinima. Robbie’s blog post about here.
A Child’s War
Fom my SLED list (Second Life Educators) came this announcement today:
The video “A Child’s War” was the year-end project for the Global Kids youth leaders in Queens, New York who spent the year working in Global Kids’ Virtual Video Project, at the Museum of the Moving Image, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The video is based on research done by the youth about the situation of child soldiers in Uganda and the upcoming trial at the International Criminal Court.
Here is the video, but be warned, it’s pretty horrific:
Read the youth leaders blogs here : http://www.holymeatballs.org/machinima/
We Are The Strange
We Are The Strange is a new indie movie being featured at the Sundance Film Festival. Described as “Mosters Inc. meets The Nightmare Before Christmas inside of a retro Japanese video game”, the film is sure to be a cult hit because it is truly… strange… from the snippets I have seen and the teasers on youtube. Here’s one of them:
Here is a review from one of the gaming bloggers, Onder Skall, who saw the movie in Second Life. There’s also some excellent critique of the movie at this site as well.
Here’s the official website.
Here’s the blog.
Here’s the myspace.
Here’s a review in Wired.
What I think is interesting is the mixed media filming techniques, described in Wired as:
a combination of 8-bit animation (think early Nintendo), Brothers Quay-style filmmaking (creepy, expressionless dolls) and the kind of 3-D landscapes gamers inhabit. Strange combined stop-motion techniques (working with dolls, clay and paper cutouts) with 3-D computer animation. He built 15 virtual sets in Cinema 4-D, using Adobe’s After Effects.
I don’t know if I could watch 88 minutes of it but I think the film making is very cool.
Four Eyed Monsters – the full feature film on youtube
In February I blogged about the innovative movie Four Eyed Monsters. Now the young producers have put the entire feature film on youtube, so here it is:
I’m so excited to be able to watch this after missing out on it when it was shown in Second Life. I love it!
Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: the audio to my conference talk
Thanks to the wonderful Alan Levine, I now have the audio recording to go with my NMC talk, here:
Alan’s write-up of my talk is on the NMC blog here – thanks so much!
I’m Heading Off for June to Speak, Research, Speak, Plan more Research etc etc…
The major speaking event I have is the featured session at the NMC Summer Conference. I was specifically invited to speak about a “bit of everything” related to my research, so here’s the slides that accompany the talk. I hope I can arrange an audio stream to support the slides for the near future.
And here is the line-up for our panel session at the ECAR conference:
Teacher Tube
Here’s a great find – a youtube for education. With all the bans by educational institutions on social software sites like Youtube, its great to find an alternative like this! Here’s a link to teaching in Second Life videos.
Wordsworth for the YouTube Generation
Everybody’s talking about:
Details here. It’s kind of disappointing that its more of a tourism marketing ploy and not about the poetry itself. More interesting to me are youtubers who are playing with or repurposing the same poem for their own purposes:
Youtube’s Geriatric1927 Featured in “My Generation” Video
I love this! Earlier this week I watched Geriatric1927′s latest youtube video and he announced that he had been involved in this music video of the famous song, “My Generation”. In this version, a whole bunch of musical seniors have been used to create an amazing music video to raise awareness of aged care issues. It’s so wonderful – watch it! You will smile all day (There’s a Myspace page as well, of course).
Update:
I just found the following information about the forming of this group:
The oldest and greatest rock band in the world – meet The Zimmers and their amazing cover of The Who’s “My Generation”.
Lead singer Alf is 90 – it’s quite something when he sings “I hope I die before I get old”. And he’s not the oldest – there are 99 and 100-year-olds in the band!
The Zimmers will feature in a BBC TV documentary being aired in May 2007. Documentary-maker Tim Samuels has been all over Britain recruiting isolated and lonely old people – those who can’t leave their flats or who are stuck in rubbish care homes.
The finale of the show is this group of lonely old people coming together to stick it back to the society that’s cast them aside – by forming a rock troupe and trying to storm into the pop charts.
Some massive names from the pop world have thrown their weight behind The Zimmers… The song is produced by Mike Hedges (U2, Dido, Cure), the video shot by Geoff Wonfor (Band Aid, Beatles Anthology), and it was recorded in the legendary Beatles studio 2 at Abbey Road.
GooTube Conspiracy: Collaborative Video Storytelling
The GooTube Conspiracy is a very funny collaborative video storytelling concept developed by popular YouTuber, Nalts. Here’s a great description from the info site:
YouTube Users Spoof Google’s Acquisition of YouTube With Fake Kidnapping Story
Online video creators are collaborating on the first viral video series that exposes a fictional “GooTube” Conspiracy. The series was initiated by one person, and has evolved into a collaborative storyline. YouTube video creators — who have never met — are participating in the plotline by posting new videos and advancing the plotline.
Philadelphia, PA — December 14, 2006
In an increasingly popular “underground” movement by active members of the YouTube video community, a collaborative plotline has emerged that depicts Google and YouTube conspiring for media domination. The story, “The GooTube Conspiracy,” began when one YouTube user posted a video claiming he was kidnapped by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Other YouTube creators began submitting unsolicited videos that developed the conspiracy story. Most of the creators have never worked together or even met each other.
“We’re experimenting with a new narrative art form,” says Kevin Nalty, who plays “Nalts,” a character desperately fleeing from YouTube and Google. “I’ve been amazed by how instantly people get engrossed in the storyline and take it in new directions.”
This is very exciting – even if the story doesn’t grab you, the concept is just wonderful.
And here’s a trailer for Series 2:
NMC Online Conference: Convergence of Video and Web Culture
Well, the NMC online conference is over and what an interesting experience it was to present in a new way. I’ve really enjoyed the conference talks and guest lectures I’ve given in Second Life, so I wasn’t certain how a java platform would go, but actually it worked great! Here’s a screenshot of me in action:
It’s very interesting really – using the Elluminate platform, which a very nice guy named Mike gave me training to use at midnight one night during the week (it’s all a blur now) – and the shot above shows its capabilities.
The powerpoint slides are shown in the main panel, as were the videos I showed, the audio streamed through simply by pressing the microphone button at the bottom left, and the list of live audience members at top left. Most interesting is the middle left panel of live discussion which scrolls through during the presentation – a side channel of conversation around the talk, and responses and questions along the way.
I really liked the idea of the side channel but when speaking it was a little difficult to follow. So I went back to the recording of the talk and watched the conversation later! It was great that they did a screen recording of each keynote because it meant I didn’t have to get up at 4am to attend! I listened to Cynthia Calongne give a wonderful talk about machinima, and Henry Jenkins speaking about participatory culture and YouTube. Here’s a shot from Henry’s talk:
It was wonderful! I also have to say that I found it very exciting to speak to a new and quite different audience than I usually do (Literacy / English / Linguistics). When I was first invited I felt rather intimidated at the thought of addressing the NMC audience because these people are all at the leading edge of new media studies (and therefore would have extremely high expectations and would know so much more than me!). But actually I think it was very rewarding and it made me spend twice as much time as usual in my thinking / reading / preparation for the presentation.
Evocative Spaces and Aesthetic Grabs (My YouTube Talk)
Click the image to go to the slides for my talk at the NMC’s Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video
A complete list of all videos mentioned in the talk are included “under the fold”.
Ysabellabrave: Youtube’s New Star
This woman is amazing, she’s like a 1940s screen Goddess.
I’ve been busy all weekend doing research and preparation for my talk about youtube and identity on Thursday (Australian time, that is). When I discovered Ysabella along the way, I became an instant fan. I would totally buy her music! I expect to read about some acting or recording deal any day now.
YouTube Fiction: Users Contribute to Narrative through Comments
More on this later, just had to upload so I didn’t forget!
