USB microphone - the Snowball
The Snowball, a USB microphone by Blue Microphones, stands on my table.
I bought it to improve the sound quality of my voice recordings. Notice the echo coming from the recorded voice in this video.
Time to Make a Difference from Tod Baker on Vimeo.
That was recorded with a MacBook built-in mic. The Snowball should eliminate that kind of echo on my upcoming projects. I also wanted a mic that connects directly to my MacBook Pro. As you can see in the photo, The Snowball cable connects directly to my computer using a USB port.
From BlueMic,
The Snowball is a direct plug n’ play mic that connects to either a Mac or PC – no additional software is needed. With its dual capsule design and unique three-pattern switch (cardioid, cardioid with -10dB pad and omni), the Snowball can handle everything from soft vocals to the loudest garage band — and it’s ideal for podcasting.
You know, The Snowball looks so cool that I expect it alone to inspire creativity in students and teachers this year. I know I plan to create a podcast for our school discussing the variety of inquiries going on throughout the school. I’m going to call it TWIST — This Week at IST. Stay tuned.
Learning Experiences that Lead Us
Sometimes, standardized tests will tell us, we arrive at the wrong answer. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports today that 933 of 1,947 Minnesota schools were put on the danger list for not making ‘adequate progress’.
Sometimes the learning experiences that lead us to the wrong answer trump the circles that students shade. In her May 18th commencement address at Smith College, Margret Edson reminds us of this journey and the love of teaching. She will lift your heart and make you laugh. Don’t miss it.
Go to Smith College’s Commencement 2008 page and click on Watch the video of Margaret Edson’s 2008 commencement address (18:30).
Thanks, Beth, for passing on this video.
Empty Inbox
An empty inbox feels so gtd good. And look at that spam count. I hope it’s the same for you — spam rarely reaches me these days.
Animoto Mash-up
The Animoto team is highlighting our video “Time to Make a Difference”.
They wrote, “Using Animoto, GarageBand & iMovie, this web 2.0 mash-up video utilizes the internet’s resources in a very clever way.” Visit their Education Program to see Time to Make a Difference and their full showcase of Animoto videos in education.
Animoto is scorned by some and embraced by others.
A Gary Stager stinger… “Animoto lets you create meaningless PowerPoint-like slideshows without all of that pesky, editing, creativity or thinking. I won’t even mention the discipline, knowledge and sense of history required of artistic expression.” Link
Chris Betcher refers to Animoto as a “…fun online video creation toy that all the cool kids are talking about. It probably doesn’t have a huge deal of educational merit (because aside from picking the photos and music, you really don’t have any say over what it actually creates) but there is no argument that what it creates looks very funky indeed. And with so little effort!” Link
Kate Foy on Animoto, “Personally, I can see Animoto working very nicely as an alternative story-boarding tool, and for learning about tempo-rhythm in visual and audio story-telling.” Link
Me? I’m sticking with Animoto. I’m going to use it to help students tell stories. No, it’s not film making. But it requires students to think about the elements that we weave together to tell a story. And it allows them to create videos they find attractive. Maybe that will inspire them to learn how to make a film from scratch.
Further Consideration
Dean Shareski asks What is video?
I discussed the making of this video back in May. Link
Tagging in Beijing and the Fail Whale: The Value of Open Content
Why should we put our work on the Web? Give it a Creative Commons license so people can share it and remix it? Why? What’s the use? Attribution? What for?
I’ve struggled with questions like these for years. Whether asking myself or responding to a colleague, my answers struggled to establish the value of sharing creative works beyond the peers in the classroom or school. I knew the value was there. I just couldn’t articulate it well. But now I have two real-life stories to tell.
Looking for a light read this drowsy Saturday morning, I chose The Story of the Fail Whale by Sarah Perez. Sarah captured my attention with her recount of the Fail Whale’s rise to stardom. But her story about the unknown Fail Whale artist’s work turning into a social media brand really woke me up. In the beginning, the artist of the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu, did not profit from Twitter’s use of the Fail Whale. Twitter grabbed the image from iStockPhoto and did not link to her. The more Twitter crashed the more Fail Whale grew in popularity. Strange, isn’t it? Anyway, a homemade Fail Whale t-shirt appeared at a party one night. It gained a lot of attention, so after the party the owner contacted Yiying Lu and encouraged her to open a Zazzle story where she could sell her work. She did and fans tweeted its arrival. What ensued, Perez describes as a “torrent of social media cooperation” that uplifted Yiying Lu and her work to high levels of recognition that gain her recognition, profits from sales, and most likely some future design work.
Yiying Lu put her creative work out there for free. Eventually, it became a social object. The art work and the people who rallied around it built her success. Yiying Lu made it happen by sharing her work on the Web.
The story of Yiying Lu resembles that of JIm Gourley and his CCTV photos. Jim is an avid photographer, writer, and inspirational member of our school community. On December 4th of last year, Jim began to take photos of the CCTV construction project.
CCTV Headquarters Bldg., Beijing, China — December 5, 2007 Photo by Jim Gourley.
He now has thousands of photos in his Flickr collection called Beijing and Architecture. You can see his CCTV photos in its set called Cite Chaillot. He tagged them and opened them to all with a Creative Commons license. Eventually, some architects interested in the unique CCTV Headquarters rising above Beijing neighborhoods discovered Jim’s photos. In his blog post Footnoted, Jim seems reluctant to tell us “This obsession of mine has seemed to have gotten some notice. A few weeks ago the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (CAPA), Paris, contacted me to use 120 of my photos of the CCTV Headquarters project in their upcoming exhibit “Dans la ville chinoise,” which includes an exhibition on Chinese contemporary emerging architecture. The show runs from June 18 to September 19, 2008.” Link
This is another example of a person’s creative work becoming a social object, helping to develop a community, fostering creativity. How? He put it on the Web and leveraged the power of crowds.
The next time I’m challenged to defend a decision to put creative work beyond the classroom walls and bulletin boards, I can talk about the Fail Whale and the CCTV photos. They are not Sputniks, but these successes can dispel the fear and doubt and cause change.
Tags: cooperation, social object, cctv, fail whale
