NMC New Media Blogs

This is a small demo to show how to add YouTube videos to something posted on the NMC web site.

What does a baby wombat look like? During my October 2007 trip to Australia , I had the opportunity to meet "Poddy", a baby wombat who was being taken care of by a family that rescues orphaned wombats. If they are not taken in they will not survive long on their own. They are raised until big enough to fend for themselves, and then released into the bush.

The Teaching Learning Center at Otis College of Art and Design is experimenting with creating YouTube and iTunesU videos to help teach skills for our freshmen in particular.

Our most recent one features an art history professor discussing some of the criteria useful in determining whether the information found in periodicals is scholarly, popular, or professional. Although not really scripted, she has worked closely with me for years on teaching info lit skills to students in the first year required art history course. She spoke extemporaneously for 55 minutes and we edited it down to 10.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-2hziLTSyU

The Teaching Learning Center has also assisted some of the Foundation Department faculty in creating learning objects.

With so many features on the new NMC web site, this summer we are experimenting with some new screencasts designed to help our members learn to use the site.

In this first example, we show the steps that individuals from member organizations can do to create their own account on the site (in good web 2.0 spirit, it is self service!)

If you click the little icon on the bottom just left of the volume control, you can view this screencast in full screen mode.

A great graphic representing a map of online communities- very useful discussion starter on new technologies from xkcd webncomics:

http://xkcd.com/c256.html

The premise of the art class seemed simple enough. Students would create a body of work reflecting their own ethnic identities and perceptions of race.

But there was a twist. Florida Atlantic University instructor Peter Fine suspected many of the graduate students would be unaware of their full genetic makeup.

So Fine, an associate art professor, asked the students in his Visualizing Race class to take DNA tests.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-pdna12feb12,0,68562...

Dumpr.net is a free webp-based tool that allows you to select images from your flickr account, apply a number of special effects, and then have them saved, or uploaded back to your flickr account as a new image.

A compant named Converse recently demo-ed software for java based phones that allow these devices to connect with and communicate in Second Life:

As demonstrated at the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona:

Attendees using Comverse's phones could see and manipulate avatars who appeared in Comverse's virtual 3GSM booth inside Second Life. Using simple commands, they could direct the avatar to walk around the booth, identify other avatars, and send them greetings via SMS, MMS, or instant messaging. And in a twist typical of today's virtual environments, people logged in to Second Life over traditional PC connections could walk into the virtual Comverse booth and pick up virtual phones that connected them directly to fellow members logged in from their real phones at the real booth.

See:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18195/

At the 2006 NMC Fall Regional Conference in San Antonio, Alan Levine (NMC) and Tom Hapgood (University of Arkansas) provided an overview of the types of features and functionality under consideration for the new web site for NMC. The theme was on very dynamic content, tagging, user generated content. Disciussion with the audience was meant to solicit ideas that would fow into the development process.

The slides from the presentation are available via Slideshare.net , a great way to distribute PowerPoint authored presentations in web friendly Flash format.

 Other information from the presentation, include all referenced web sites, is available at:http://www.nmc.org/nmcpedia/Content_Is_You_Links