NMC New Media Blogs

Found this cute parable story on YouTube, written by Margaret Meijers and illustrated by Susan Meijers. See if you can make the connections to the metaphors!

PS This is actually a test of some new NMC web site functionality; if all the duct tape is in the right place, this story will be posted to my twitter account

At last! Google has formally announced the support of CalDAV in its calendar app. So what? What does this mean? Well for Mac users, now you can sync up your Google Calendars with iCal and then add and delete events on either calendar and its updated almost in real time. No more work arounds, hacks or third party solutions. Very nice! The announcement is here on the official Google Mac Developers blog. You'll need Google's little sync app, calabration, to make it happen but its drop dead easy.

Happy Syncing...

Keene Haywood (The University of Texas at Austin)

http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/blogs/brett_bixler_e-portfolio/

I also maintain a blog on educational gaming and virtual worlds at

http://gaming.psu.edu

Hope to see you there!

Histografica is an interesting resource of user contributed media - they are aming to build a large collection of historical photographstied to the geographic location and time period; so you can search for photos by both time range and location. 

For exmple, searching on Washngton DC pre 1904, I found this photo of the Smithsonian Institution from 1898

You can help grow it by either sharing your photos or adding helpful information to exisiting ones via the comments form.

As the education world begins to get its head around Twitter and the concept of microblogging, a potentially useful way to use this is to look at keywords that are tied to location. Such a tool exists and is quite interesting, almost mesmerising, to watch. But it can also be a quick way for teachers and students to get a snapshot of Twitter posts for a given location. The website Monitter allows one to key in a location and up to three key words and it will then pull Twitter feeds onto the screen. Recording a screencast of the results could be useful in a number of academic areas such as journalism, communications and new media. Plus its just plain fun. So even if you are not Twittering, you can at least play the bystander role and watch others.

Hindsight is 20-20 and no one can really predict the future. In terms of the internet, the term Web 2.0 is starting to seem a bit long in tooth. It is incredible to see where the web has come from just a few years ago. It is a bit harder to predict where things are heading, although a few of the experts have given their two cents about it, which was recently written about on the ReadWriteWeb blog . The big buzzword for the next iteration of the web is "semantic". This word is being bandied about within the context of personalization, artificial intelligence and highly contextualized search. In other words, the prediction is that the web will become a version of itself that is smarter, more powerful and more meaningful to each individual user. It is the lack of true semantics in web technologies that create such a time suck for many people.

Using technology for the sake of art is perhaps one of its finest and highest uses IMHO. We are so often caught up in how technology gives us access to more information, collaboration, communication, etc, but when someone does something with it that is truly artistic it makes you smile. The ever popular Boing Boing blog brought the Perroquet to reader's attention. It is well done slow motion photography and video work done by the fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Called Perroquet, it shows the beauty of the movement in a parrot's wings. Quite mesmerizing...and inspiring.

Keene Haywood (UT-Austin)