Archive for Cool Stuff I Found To Share

The Generations of Narrative.

Posted on February 26, 2007 by

Oral storytelling. Written story (including recording of many originally spoken tales). Motion pictures. Animation. Live broadcasting. Video.

Transmutation isn’t quite the word for it. Neither is transformation. Nor evolution. I settled for “Generations.” We don’t discard older formats when we add a new one to our story-telling heritage.

Now, the power of story is transformed again, as the storyteller incorporates virtual reality.

Virtual Setting. The creating of avatars that live a virtual life can be used as a powerful form of story-telling. Think of the possibilities! Places like Second Life allow many people to create a landscape together. Landscapes (the setting for a story) can create a personal reality, jointly imagined. The look of a virtual landscape can be precisely engineered to give the viewer a sense of place. Newer processors allow cleverly rendered images and sound systems that immerse the reader in “3-d”. Virtual reality can be rendered so well they give participants who move too quickly in it motion sickness. Individual blades of grass, the speed of the clouds scudding across the sky, and the shadows they cast, can be programmed to respond to the “apparent breeze.” You may not notice the subtle changes in cloud shadows on the tree trunks and such, but I’ll bet they have a subliminal effect which adds to the sense of “reality” of the place. In fact, things can seem too real. I remember that the designers of Fiona in the original Shrek said they took a step back from looking too realistic, in order to make it “fit” their sense of a fairy tale story (I got this from the DVD I bought, it came with added features that explained some of the rendering work).

Character. Here’s another place where the story can be jointly imagined. In a virtual reality, your avatar is a character. People usually only helm one avatar at a time. Now with common meeting grounds like Second Life, you can bring as much of yourself to the landscape as you might as an author. You might choose to don a persona, like a traditional author dons a pseudonym.

Point of View. Jointly imagined. Or not. I suppose it is possible to render a world, and a story, completely, and then invite others to bring their avatars to come live it. Avatars entering the story can have their actions completely “scripted” by the person who created the story. Or, they can make some decisions on their own. Think of the new take on “choose your own adventure” type stories! The story would be communicated through an “avatar’s eye view.” Talk about a new point of view!

In my next post, I plan to list links to some videos I use to talk about traditional video, digital editing, story creation, the impact of web20, and machinima with my students. If you know of anything “avatar’s-eye view” that I can add, let me know.

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Filed under: Avatar, Cool Stuff I Found To Share, Machinima, media, Second Life, Storytelling, web3-d, Web3D

So, are you going to be a secret agent?

Posted on January 21, 2007 by

In response to my question, this 8 year old’s face becomes so animated it transforms into a different person than I’m used to seeing, and I can’t help but return his grin as he answers, “As soon as I’m 30 days old!” I’ve come to think of this particular friend of my son’s as preferring to play independently of adult interactions whenever possible. It’s thrilling to see how open and enthusiastic he is about this.

Will Richardson’s timely post about setting up an account at “Club Penguin” for his children helped me realize that I had recently heard some fifth graders mention it. Then, my husband heard a public radio story about it and thought he had heard about 3rd party ads aimed at the kids (there are none!). Having a child with a birthday this weekend…I took a free penguin for a test spin, and learned enough to decide to give my 3rd grader a club penguin account as a gift.

Test driving a penguin

So, my first “avatar” was a penguin, and he waddled about in a virtual world. He collected coins with which to buy and feed pets, or update his igloo, by playing games or doing good deeds. The games remind me a lot of the arcade games of my youth–I spent hours playing “pong” at a local soda shop. This game world, complete with 70′s style arcade games, reminded me of the old t.v. series, Happy Days.

  • I wonder if anyone’s named their penguin The Fonz? I hope they bought him a black leather jacket and a motorcycle.

So, the games are goal oriented, not necessarily an educational goal (no math fact drills, here), but, still, penguins have a motivating rationale for playing the games. Get coins, feed their pets (called puffles).

As I began to discuss the possibility of getting my son an account with him, we worked out how many of his friends and classmates already had a penguin.

  • I was surprised to learn that a fourth of our Intermediate students –3rd through 5th grade–already had penguin avatars! Many of their older siblings did, too.

Obviously, our students will explore social possibilities online. In fact, my son’s friend has two older siblings who have penguins, and the three siblings have been known to talk with each other using their penguins, despite the fact that they are all in the same house and could talk face to face. We must assume that many students, especially when they are not in the same locale, will want to chat with their friends online, so why not steer them into this safe area to chat and hang out in? If we don’t steer these early experiments into safe arenas, would they be finding spaces meant for older people (like MySpace) or general IM-ing? Would I, as a teen in the 70s, have gone to a seedier shop to play my video games if that was the only choice? Yep. I’d be sure I’d be fine.

And for those worried about the demise of other skills, since we had a daily time limit on the game, my son and his friend wound up drawing their penguins and puffles, and even making a comic strip of an adventure, today. On his birthday…

Parental controls allow us to set up “ultimate safe chat” or “safe chat” — and each family should gauge the maturity of their children in making that choice. Just as some 8 year olds will need rules, such as “no going online before your homework is done”, or “only for x minutes per day,” some 8 year olds will not need those strictures. Some kids will enjoy trying to push the limits of the rules. Thus, ultimate safe chat can guide a child in communicating in prescribed phrases, and some kids are motivated to behave so that they can become secret agents and find hidden places in the world. Still other children will find ways to pretend they are stealing items by going up to and touching them, but penguins who play at crime and get caught are banned from becoming secret agents…

So now, I’m a mom who knows about how to feed and care for a puffle and where to earn a lot of coins most easily. I taught my son “leet speak” for “got to go” (gtg)—and he promised to teach me any new ones he learns. We’re partners exploring this world together.

So, are you gonna be a secret agent? What a cool mom I am, to ask that question!

I better go explore Second Life, soon, so I can keep that “cool mom” status.

So, it is time to talk of many things… of Penguins, and Puffles, of avatars and safe-chat, of what is personal identity information, and what the moderators do…

Waaay before third grade!

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Filed under: Cool Stuff I Found To Share

Adding Resource Page

Posted on December 23, 2006 by

I thought it would be really helpful to keep track of the cool stuff that I have heard about and want to try out on its own page here. So, I have added a Tech Resources Page and am starting to fill in the details–I will try and do that in the order of the way I tried things out. Just so I can see how I’ve been getting my feet wet. I am pretty new to most of these tools…but enjoying diving right in.
Like this blogging thing. I found I could add a page to my blog, but everytime I tried to edit it and hit “publish” the page would disappear and become a post on my main page instead. I’ll go to the forums and see if someone there can help me figure it out.

… (Time passes)… Ah ha, the wisdom of the forum explains that I want a wiki if I want many pages to edit.  On a blog, there is a blog page, and then “static” pages may be attached (but only static ones). I need to make a wiki for my resources links!

Meanwhile, I’m about to break for the holidays.  When I get back, I want to spend more time on the lesson planning and less on the how-to’s of blogging.  I think I am far enough along to get some good tools and tips for my students, now to devise how to give them relevant experiences to practice with.

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Filed under: Cool Stuff I Found To Share, Tech Among Teachers

That’s NOT REAL!

Posted on December 4, 2006 by

From time to time I interrupt the regular flow of class to share about something newly emerged on the web. I call these a “bit of cool” and they really help my kids who need extra time to transition from one activity, like our typing teaching program, to another activity.

These updates have included a high-speed playback of a beauty makeover complete with photoshop changes to the model. An ordinary woman, including freckles, sits down, and through time-lapse photography we see what a crew of makeup, lighting, and photo artists makes of her–then, we see her picture modified using something like photoshop, so that her neck becomes longer, her eyes are magnified, with a few easy clicks. Finally, the result is put on a billboard.

The makeover demonstrates that no-one, even the model involved, could hope to look like the picture of the model that wound up on the bill board. I comment that I hope none of my students is trying to look like her–because no-one really can. This wonderful, short video clip comes from The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

Boys don’t have that kind of resource:

I searched for a similar way to help the boys in my classes understand that the “B**flex” commercials and the “B**watch” actors are actually setting an unreal standard, even for someone willing to spend all their time body-building. The closest I came was this article, by Alicia Potter, talking about male body image and explaining that

Being a man these days seems, well, an awful lot like being a woman. For men, more than ever, looks count. In Vogue and Men’s Health alike, modern-day Adonises sell everything from protein powder to Armani cologne. They’ve got washboard abs, silky skin, nipples so erect they cast shadows. The male torso reigns as the decade’s most powerful “crossover image” (appealing to men, women, gays, and straights alike), reports Peter Arnell of the New York advertising agency the Arnell Group.

Really, it’s pretty amazing, that “Doctors can lift the flap of skin on the back of the lower leg, insert a hunk of silicone, and presto: handsome, bulging calves.”

Plastic Calves! Please, if anyone knows of a resource similar to the Dove Campaign for Beauty to help young men understand the relatively newer, fiercer pressures on their body image, let me know.

I need to share it. So do you. At the very least, show the Dove makeover to all your students, including the guys.

Thanks.

Pax,

Sue

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Filed under: Body Image, Cool Stuff I Found To Share, graphics, media, My Middle School Tech Class, women