Exploring the impact of social media

Today you are to explore the creation, design and impact of social media on individuals, society and business. You are to research and document your findings to your blog. Points for consideration include:

• How social media was/is designed and created
• Ways in which social media is used
• Impact of social media on:
  • Business,
  • Youth / adults
  • Relationships
  • Communication
  • News
  • Other…
• Future developments and trends for social media design and use

A good starting read is,
http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/.

Slam Poetry of the Streets

I try every day to give a little time to reading, watching or listening to things so that I can learn or reflect on both my personal experience or how I provide knowledge to others, my students.  Today as I was listening to the stream of TEDx Sydney I was fortunate enough to see a recording from 2013 of Omar Musa delivering a brilliant Slam Poem that made me think about and evaluate the educational value and views of people in society and schools.  I feel that it would be interesting to hear the responses of my senior students to this performance.  This would be a great stimulus piece.

Freehand animation as artwork on wall

This is a great video on the creation of an artwork based on hand drawn frame-based animated images on a wall.  Here is the brief from Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/88836644

A continuous vertical freehand digression.

I was invited to install some animation at the Prøve Gallery in Duluth MN. I set out drawing columns of free hand animation directly onto the gallery wall. “Plumb” is the film product of the installation.

Music and assistance by N. H. Teraberry

Design and Layout Trends for Websites

These links all contain a great set of stimulus sites and contemporary information about trends in design and layout.

Dreamweaver and Web design tutorials

I have started to work with my students on the development of websites using Adobe Dreamweaver and directing the students to explore HTML5 and CSS3. The following links are the result of some searching for a range of tutorials and web-design tips for the students to access as they work through completing a project.

http://www.byol.com.au/tutorial/dreamweaver-cc-tutorial.html#.VVLOA_mqqkp

http://layersmagazine.com/category/dreamweaver

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/shorttutorials/8-web-design-tricks-that-will-knock-your-socks-off

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/30-html5-tutorials/

6 hours of retouching in 90 seconds

It is always interesting to see the use and development of photographs and images using Photoshop.  Here is a great example of a professional at work and the difference between the natural and the printed.

History of Adobe Photoshop

As an avid user of Adobe Photoshop I found this an interesting infographic as it gives a nice overview of the history and the development of Adobe Photoshop.

Tom Thum: The orchestra in my mouth

This may not be the most pedagogically challenging TED talk I have posted about but it is great to make the students aware of their creativity.  Amazing beat-boxing,

Personal Metadata: Some articles

As someone who educates in the realm of Digital Media and Computer Science I have found it interesting to follow the developments of a recently published article about an individuals request to gain access to their personal metadata from a major Telco. The concepts explored in this article, Me and my metadata, relate closely to an article from 2011published by Zeit Online, Betrayed by our own data. There are many implications that these articles identify including privacy and personal profiling.

These articles provide valuable stimulus for students to explore real-world scenarios on topics that they need to be made aware of. This is particularly pertinent for senior students in High School studying Computer Science courses.

Creating and posting a blog post in Word

Whilst checking and reviewing some student blogs I have noticed that the speed and quality of the posts written is negatively impacted by the time it takes to write and format a post. One method to speed this up, and improve the visual impact of the posts is to use the blog posting feature in Microsoft Word. To help people along with how to use this function follow the steps below.

Special Note: I have recently established that for these instructions to work your office software needs to be set to save the document as a .docx file before you try to connect your site.

1. From the File tab select the ‘Save and Send’ option then ‘Publish as Blog Post’. This will seem to open a new window with a different set of options along the top for blogs.

   

2. From the options at the top select ‘Manage Accounts’

   

3. From these options select ‘New’

   

4. Now choose your blog provider. In our case ‘WordPress’

   
   

5. Now enter your blogs web address into the Blog Post URL text box. Please note that this will require you to add an ‘HTTPS’ at the start. Otherwise copy and past the URL of your website and leave the ‘/xmlrpc.php’ on the end. Following this enter your Username and Password information.

   
   

6. If everything is correct a message box will appear to inform you of your success. You should now be able to post using Word to your blog. If an error pops up then you may need to check the details and URL are entered correctly.