drawing (on experience)

Just a quick one today, exploring the FOSS program: Inkscape. Draw Freely a vector graphics editor for creating SVG web graphics, technical diagrams, icons, creative art, logos, maps. The goal? Just playing really, but if anything works out I’ll be adding it to the Open Clip Art Library which is an archive of user contributed public domain clip art released under a creative commons license.

(tags: software graphics opensource vector svg art authoring drawing illustration illustrator image inkscape pictures tool CLIPART graphics images opensource art creativecommons drawings gallery icons inkscape logo openoffice resources)

thinking of the long white cloud

While Leigh, Rose, Sean, Jo and others are just kicking off the future of learning in a networked world in NZ, exploring Informal Learning and other online adventures, I’ve been plugging away at my I.T. Docs and MP3s project, putting a couple of hundred I.T. related word documents online. I’ve converted them to MP3s. and created a searchable full text index of the collection, with an RSS feed for any given search string so the results can easily be integrated into a wiki or blog. It’s been a satisfying project (enough to keep me going in the face of a rather apathetic bunch of students), but I still wish I was with my good friends over in Dunedin – perhaps I could get someone to make me a dorodango as a sort of consolation.

Of course, I don’t have the spare time for a conference, the only reason I’ve had time for my document and mp3 project is that I’ve dropped my study to just 2 subjects this semester (and pretty well ignored those subjects too), but I know I’m going to have to attend to the formal study soon, and have tagged Zotero to see if it can help there (and perhaps for blogging too, though the del.iciou.us links seem to be pushing me along quite well enough on this front). Zotero’s a research tool for firefox that allows you to capture citation, screendumps, notes etc. and ferret through them in a variety of ways. Currently it’s in private beta, but will be launching for public beta soon.

It’s funny how much I dislike being a student, as opposed to the enjoyment I get from inflicting the learning experience on my poor students – but more than both, I enjoy creating tools. I think the key word here is ‘creation’, and the three areas seem to lie along a continuum of opportunity for this act.

(tags: teaching elearning audio resouces it search ica05 edublogs TALO onlinelearning learning education informal poster presentation image media art howto mud tutorial ball dorodango japanese dirt fun todo toread firefox research tools citation reference opensource bibliographic knowledge metadata plugins tool)

immortality and impermanence

I found a couple of nice sites highlighting impermanent art today. The first, Scott Wade’s Dirty Car Art is the western equivalent of Tibetan sand mandalas. Scott creates some amazing work on the dusty rear window of his car and then photographs their deterioration. The second, Chalk Drawings is a series of sidewalk chalk drawings (astonishing Escher-like illusions). The interesting thing is that although they espouse the impermanence of their art, each artist has committed them to the web – where they could outlast much more ‘permanent’ artworks committed to canvas or print.

And for those of us without a drawing bent: OurStory looks quite interesting. It’s a site for telling and storing life stories (text, photos, video or audio) – I don’t know that I’d hope for immortality here (it could fold in a month), but it’s got a nice web2.0 interface with some helpful prompts for overcoming writer’s/photographer’s block. In fact, they’ll send you a regular email with a story-building question in each to help you along your way. It’s an interesting approach which could be translated to the classroom without much effort.

For the next level: building your own digital story; you could do worse than download the UNESCO Young Digital Creators CD-ROM kit – a CD-ROM for Digital Creators, teachers and moderators which includes win, mac and linux versions of the GIMP, Audacity, inkscape, tux paint, nvu, abiword, freemind and scribus. This is part of the UNESCO YDC Educator’s Kit, designed to help you generate and manage project-based learning activities with young (and not-so-young) people. A nicely rounded package for image, audio and web page creation/editing with some mind mapping software thrown in for good measure. I must say, I’m very attracted to learning programs on XP that I can later use on Linux (if and when I make the move – I think I might celebrate the release of Windows Vista with another foray into running Linux on my laptop)

And if you need some help with the web side of things, try the Web Developer’s List of Resources – an extensive portal of web development resources with an A-list of sites arranged in helpful categories. For more information, you might try Windows Live. It’s probably not a google crusher, but an extensive test; looking up my domain name ‘abacci’ returned better results on the live site than google (which only managed to find sites that referred to abacci.com, not the actual site itself).

(tags: search microsoft google searchengine GIMP Audacity inkscape tuxpaint nvu abiword freemeind scribus unesco digital education software digitalmedia life story history digitalstorytelling blogging community inspiration images journal memory photography projects publishing sharing storytelling timeline tool todo webdev WebDesign resources 3755a 3756d 3756y 3756x 3755g 3755p 3756z toread ***** art car dirt images Art chalk drawings illustration illusion) thanks to KEmery for the sand mandala pic.

Auto-blog entry from del.icio.us links

Ha, lazy blogger trick #1: create blog entries without actually writing anything. Now I just have to come back every now and then to give a little spiel on why I found these links worthy of inclusion in my del.icio.us stable. Yesterday’s crop:

Scan, copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera

a service that lets you capture information contained in paper documents or whiteboards. 1) capture the image using your mobile camera phone or digital camera 2) send the image to scanr 3) get back an email which includes a searchable digital PDF file of your image this works best with a high res image (1 to 2 GB), but looked promising for capturing that end-of-lecture mess you’ve created on the whiteboard – ready to post on your blog or something

(tags: scan tools pdf Mobile photo mlearning interesting todo)

artomat

retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art – pretty obviously, this link came about while writing my last post.

(tags: art artomat art-o-mat vending fun todo)

Vending Machines

Vending machines have been in my mind of late. It all started with a reference I found to an art vending machine in New York – $5 art from a defunct cigarette dispenser. “What a cool idea” I thought, and moved on to other distractions. Shortly thereafter, I spotted an article on book vending machines in Paris.

Thinks: if you wanted to build something like this for yourself, you might start with a search on eBay for vending machines – plenty there to choose from in a range of styles and prices. If you had enough second hand books you might decorate your vending machine in the style of Patrick Hall…

And that’s as far as I’ve come with this project Actually, I’ve looked into where you might plug a book vending machine in, and picked up an industrial strength guillotine for creating the decor, and have actually tossed out about 3 ute loads of paperbacks since then, but it’s still in my head. Why write about it now? Well, another bunch of vending machine pix took my fancy. Originally thunk up my the German employment agency, jobsintown, I thought the TAFE should use this idea for themselves – click on each for an enlargement.

Ah… magic boxes. You put your money in and stuff comes out, but how it happens is anyone’s guess.