Bryan Alexander began his keynote with The Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris to show how gaming works to teach. Remixed archival footage, video footage, etc… that anyone can grab and build. The multimedia synthesis is becoming the norm.

Trend extrapolation is one key of futurism that includes assumptive quantitative arcs, allows us to examine trends. Broadband increases and 5 exabytes in 2002 to 11,240 transferring online in 2011.

He’s discussing Chromium the new Google Laptop, which doesn’t have a hard drive.

For my students independent reading project this quarter, they had to make a video that showcased one of the books from a short reading list that included Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This group wanted to turn their’s in two weeks early. Here it is.

Consider the information in the video above. What is the purpose behind the video? If we define the video in terms of the rhetorical situation, there’s certain analysis that is evident albeit if I then explain to you that it’s an advertisement for a paper book, how does that change your consideration for the above video?

Comments?

As part of my work with MaricopaTech, I recently blogged on Flickr and included a video I made of how to search Flickr for Creative Commons license images. Check out my post here.

In Novemember at NCTE I headed into a session where PJ Haarsma, the author of The Softwire series, was presenting on Science Fiction and Gaming in the High School Classroom. I was hoping to have PJ sign his up and coming book The Softwire: Wormhole Pirates on Orbis 3. When I walked in, Jim Blasingame, ASU professor and presentation chair, welcomed me, shook my hand, and told me that he wanted me to join the panel. I was surprised, but eager. I joined PJ, Jim, Pete, and a teacher named Kristina on a panel to discuss how to use video games to get kids excited about reading science fiction.

PJ discussed what he and Jim calls the simulated literary experience (SLE), and that reminded me of how we now see more and more trailers for books, instead of just movies. PJ uses video games to hook readers, and he and Dr. Goggin suggest that we need to redefine “literacy”. Literacy is now whatever we want it to be as creator and consumer. We cannot define literacy as just the ability to read and write; literacy in the 21st century included images, audio and video, too (for example see Gee 2003).

The concept of multimodal composition isn’t a new one, but a colleague and I have been developing courses at Mesa Community College that move beyond the traditional formal papers and more into the 21st century multimodal realms.

In what quickly became my portion of the panel presentation, I discussed the use of wikis to generate collective intelligence lexicons based on Haarsma’s The Softwire Series; of (when) the students generate the lexicon, PJ hopes to publish it in the rear of the paperback in March 2009. I just need to better motivate the students to become excited about this entire endeavor. I am also excited that on another level, this may lead to other presentation and publications for us. The power of technology used to increase youth literacies is exciting.

A couple weeks after that presentation, my name popped up on the grid here. I didn’t know the video from the presentation was online. Here it is.

Michael Wesch spoke last year at MaricopaTech, and our visions of what “students” means mesh nicely. I, obviously, struggle on a smaller level what he struggles to accomplish on a grander level.

Political standings aside, here’s a great comparison of Obama and McCain from Stephen Colbert using Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which is a very accessible nonfiction novel about Shakespeare. Colbert and his counterpart Jon Stewart are master rhetoricians. What can you find in this short video?

Earlier this summer our 9 year old television blew up. We got a 42″ HD LCD 1080P television and naturally we wanted to follow this up with an HD DVR box. We’d gotten a ton of stuff from Cox about recording hundreds of hours of Olympics, so we headed over there. Everything installed just fine, but after one evening of taping our box was full! This was terrible.

Donna had my calling Cox at 1AM one evening, and they said with high def the video storage is ONLY 16-20 hours! Donna was really upset and I was getting the brunt of it. When installing the box I knew it had USB ports, firewire ports, and eSata ports. If I could just figure out how to connect the Cox HD DVR box to an external hard drive then I would be in the money. The guy at Cox told me this was possible and it made it sound easy, so Claire and I headed over to Best Buy. We found a good hard drive and took it home. Donna was ok with the decision and waited for me to connect it. Well, nothing happened. Nothing at all. I left it connected over night, and I still was over 80% on the box.

The next day I did some research and the Scientific Atlantic manual and website said that this should work just fine. I called Cox back and complained. They said they had no idea what I was talking about it, and this should not work. I was frustrated and went back on the Best Buy site. I found another hard drive that said something like “DVR Expander” on the box. I figured I’d grab it, and if it doesn’t work then I was out of luck. Te “DVR Expander” was not much more. I got it home, crossed my fingers, connected it, and I got the following notification on the screen! I quickly agreed, checked the storage capacity, and it had dropped from 80%+ to about 28%!!!!

2008_Aug_CyberSalonAZ_04, originally uploaded by nooccar.

Here’s a brief video on how to add gmail contacts to a mailing group. As we all know, Google Apps changes almost daily. As for now this way works!

Add Contacts to a mailing group

Thank you, Mr Adams from Devon Adams on Vimeo.

My students “borrowed” my MacBookPro and made me an “End of the Year” video in May 2008. I found it today.