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.
art, blogging, digitalmedia, gimp, google, inspiration, microsoft, publishing, search, todo, toread, webdev | Comment (0)…and don’t forget, FOSS at least once a day.
In an effort to wean myself from proprietary file formats and closed source programs I’ve been playing with Linux of late. In fact, I started with free BSD back in the ’90s, but have been a bit more focused recently. I’ve gotten tired of being forced into updates and of having my favorite programs fade away through bankruptcy or being bought out by uncaring players in the market. My latest foray has been learning how to use the GIMP for image editing, and I’ve been very happy with it so far.
To share the love, in October sys admin Steve and I will be running a ‘Software Freedom Day’ at Bathurst TAFE, when we hope to have people bring in their PCs so we can help them install Linux and open source software on them. My current distro of choice is Ubuntu and we’ll also be installing EasyUbuntu, which is a python script that adds the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks not found in the base distribution.
(tags: ubuntu easyubuntu utilities Video apps apt-get codec drivers debian dvd fonts flash foss install linux mp3 multimedia music opensource Script todo)
In other links…
In the same spirit of freedom, I’ve been looking into Google Apps for Your Domain, which is a collaboration service that ties together Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar and Google Page Creator. I wonder what would happen if we used this tor create a nation-wide community of students for each module or course that we teach?
(tags: talotools google web2.0 apps office calendar collaboration gmail mashup wysiwyg editor online)
On the teaching front, I looked at Metacafe – Producer Rewards, which offers financial rewards for creating and submitting popular videos, thinking that it could be a good incentive for the digital media students. Imagine if funtwo had picked up a couple of cents for every viewing?
(tags: video digitalmedia metacafe)
arc90 lab : tools : Link Thumbnail
some JavaScript/CSS that shows users a small image of the destination page when they hover over external links – I’m not sure I’ll be using this one, but tagged it for my web development students to have a look at
(tags: ajax DHTML javascript css arc90 thumbnails links external)
Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer
a free microsoft app for WYSIWYG blog authoring with some nice features for manipulating images. I know, this goes right against my FOSS initiative, but its so goddamn alluring – I get spell checking (much needed), the ability to keep draft copies (i.e. a backup of my postings), and some pretty handy image manipulation and upload features which work transparently with both my blogspot and wordpress blogs. I’ve never looked much into local editing packages for blogging, but this just might spur me to look on sourceforge for something in the FOSS range.
(tags: blogging Windows tools microsoft wysiwyg wordpress todo)
a Javascript library that allows you to embed Google Search in your web pages and other web applications – another one on the to-do list for the web dev students
(tags: ajax google api search plugin mashup JavaScript web2.0 webdev)
The Elements of Style for Designers
use it for writing or designing web sites, this is an interesting post either way. It might even be good for a nascent blogger to pour over…
(tags: architecture article blogging communication creativity guidelines inspiration publishing toread writing style copywriting)
Script, apps, apt-get, calendar, codec, collaboration, debian, drivers, dvd, flash, fonts, foss, gmail, google, install, linux, mashup, mp3, multimedia, music, office, opensource, talotools, todo, ubuntu easyubuntu utilities Video apps, web2.0, wysiwyg | Comment (0)