31
Aug 11

Beautiful Data

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“[…] data visualization brings a sense of wonder and humanity back to statistical analysis.

Maximum PC has a fun feature on the presentation of data in unexpected – and often arrestingly beautiful – ways.  Above, you see the representation of “Familiar Feelings” by Moloko as a fiery twist of information about the song’s construction as compiled by Matthias Dittrich.  The appeal is immediately apparent, especially to anyone who has lost five minutes by staring into the iTunes Visualizer while a favorite track plays.  While the article is nothing too profound, the gallery is a nice dose of pretty for a Wednesday.


28
Aug 11

World Wide Narratives

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Sometimes you happen upon a project that has the potential to impact far more people than those enrolled in a particular class.  With Harrisburg’s World Wide Narratives – and the connected Mobile Media Pilot – I think I’ve found just that.

Friday afternoon and early evening, I found myself in one of the most diverse classroom settings I’ve ever been in, both as a professional and as a student.  Individuals from differing genders, races, religions, nationalities, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds, ages and more came together as one team in the Olmsted Building for the purpose of documenting the stories of others different from themselves for these categorical reasons – and the same as them in one key respect:  that they are human beings with important experiences to share with the community.

Shivaani Selvaraj, Jo Tyler and Martha Strickland offered a vibrant presentation on the project goals, the critical incidence story listening techniques to be employed and the research campus climate opportunities inherent in World Wide Narratives’ success.  They also invited me along to give an overview of how the iPod touch could be best deployed as a story gathering tool and to give technical advice and guidance to participants.

To say I was honored would be an understatement.


24
Aug 11

The Excitement Builds

Media Commons has set to work planning out the next installment of Tailgate – and we hope to document the process this year to keep future attendees, presenters and other participants updated.  Each member of our team will be reporting on a different area, with mine being web materials.  Without further ado:

I’ve just updated the Twitter widget and added one for Facebook as well.  You can find these both in the sidebar.  This comes on the heels of last month’s general clean up and reorganization of Tailgate 2010 materials to make way for new content.  Next up:  adding information about the pre-conference workshop (subject to be determined) and names of presenters and panelists as we book them.  
Some other blogs from the team to visit before their posts start appearing on the Tailgate site include:  
And, of course, my own – Reflectant.

18
Aug 11

MC 101 Wrap Up: Mont Alto

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I’ve just pulled back in to State College after my final MC 101 for the Summer at Mont Alto.  Today’s session was an afternoon presentation and took place during the regularly scheduled Faculty/Staff Development Day.  As such, I was also on campus for a variety of faculty consultation sessions and the Chancellor’s address at the welcome back luncheon.  Having had a chance to hear what was new and exciting at Mont Alto this Fall, I went into MC 101 aware of the topics that would be of interest for the Fall semester.
Faculty were very interested in the Mobile Media Pilot and Dan Mroz, outgoing IT Director, asked if I could put on an impromptu iOS editing demo at the end of my session.  Luckily, a document camera was available in the podium I was presenting from and the demonstration went off without a hitch.  I expect to hear from several individuals with proposals for Spring semester pilot projects (with any luck).
As this session was part of an existing itinerary, I will not be able to do formal assessment but have asked Dan to follow up with attendees on my behalf and have provided links to resources I think faculty/staff may want to research further.

17
Aug 11

MC 101 Wrap Up: Beaver

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Today marked the first of my second set of Media Commons 101 sessions.  It was great revisiting the presentation materials after a month off from it and I found that I left the session just as enthusiastic as when the slides were brand new.  And so were the attendees.  Despite the 9:00 am start time – and FTCAP pulling many registered folks away – everyone was in good spirits and excited to talk about media project possibilities for their Spring courses.  
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Eyes lit up at the same mentions as other MC 101 sessions: One Button Studio, Mobile Media Pilot and EGC’s gamification. It’s my expectation to have requests for the first immediately, proposals for the second by mid-semester and questions about the third very soon.
Evaluations have gone out (as of five minutes from now) and results will be posted when available.

Update:  Evaluation

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Not that this particular chart requires and overabundance of explanation, but all 4 respondents out of the 8 participants thought that the MC 101 overview (the meat of the presentation) was Excellent.
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Respondents found that the overall MC 101 agenda was both Relevant and Interesting to them professionally, scoring 3 Strongly Agree to 1 Agree for each question.
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No low marks were given for any of the particular aspects of the event, though Venue received a higher number of Good scores than anything else.  Since FTCAP was taking place on campus, MC 101 was relegated to the Seminar room in the Library, an older presentation space with a fading projector and more space than necessary for the small group.  The responses in this particular column are understandable and everyone was in a jovial mood about being in the “Library cellar.”
More important than the good marks for me has been two direct faculty contacts inquiring about future project work for later in the Fall or during the Spring 2012 semester.  Since Beaver had involved me with no projects up until this point, it’s a very exciting outcome – and exactly what we aimed to accomplish by getting to the campuses with this programming.

10
Aug 11

To The Moon

Can a 16-bit game be cinematic and haunting?  To The Moon is sure trying.  This new title from indie developer Free Bird Games combines the sweeping (melo)drama of Asian storytelling with the graphics of A Link to the Past era Zelda and the mind exploration of Michel Gondry.  And I like the recipe a lot.  So if you’ve ever wanted to play the first five minutes of Up! – you know, the tear-jerking part – then this is the game for you!

01
Aug 11

Revisiting AR Idea

In speaking with Hannah today, we started discussing student writing projects and some potential course applications for the embeddable AR/QR codes I had blogged about back in June.  Now that I have a second set of gears turning, I’m hopeful that we might be able to identify some faculty to approach about possibly integrating existing video projects into classroom writing assignments.  More to come…