12:00 noon
Frist Multipurpose Room B
Educational Technologies Center | McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
A couple months ago I did a presentation at Productive Scholar about annotating digital documents. I didn’t talk much about GoogleDocs in that talk. Although their commenting feature was perfectly nice, it seemed a bit too simple and didn’t seem to really take advantage of the medium. Well apparently also a couple months ago, Google changed their commenting feature and it is worth taking another look at. They are now calling them ‘discussion’ rather than comments which makes perfect sense because they have added the ability to reply to comments much as you would in a discussion board or when commenting on a blog post. Each reply in a discussion has a picture of the commenter so it is clear who commented, and a timestamp so it is clear when they commented. The author of a comment can also be alerted by e-mail when someone replies to their comment. There is also a button labeled ‘Resolve’ in the discussion area. Clicking this button will hide the discussion from view. It can later be restored from a ‘Discussions’ menu in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
365 Sketches is a project in which I use free and open source software to do a single visual design every day. The project is currently in its second year of production, and was started as a way to force myself to do at least one thing every day to build upon my design skills. You can visit the project and follow my progress at http://365sketches.org. As time went on, it became a public visual diary, a way for people to come together online and converse about, suggest ideas for, and critique my work. The work is occasionally practical, sometimes clever, often funny, and increasingly personal. I continue to achieve the goals that I had planned for in the beginning of the project. I have seen a gradual improvement and evolution of my design, typography and photomanipulation skills, but I also received many other unforeseen benefits, such as gaining an audience, being contracted for new consulting work, taking part in shows and presentations on the project, and feeling a genuine desire to keep making more pieces. Continue reading “Lunch and Learn: John LeMasney on 365 Sketches”
Al Jazeera recently created a Twitter Dashboard that illustrates what country people are tweeting from and what they are tweeting. It is a great graphic visualization tool of the real-time revolutions happening in the Middle East. This is a great way to visualize history in the making and how twitter can be used to record real time events. It is also a great example of how you can analyze statics in a graphical way using Twitter. If you would like the see the dashboard, click on the link below:
iSquint is a free iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X. Drag your file(s) into the iSquint window and click Start. You can choose “TV” or “iPod” size, set the quality, crop, set the audio/video bitrate and framerate. For students creating large video files in FinalCut Pro and needing those to transfer to Youtube, iSquint is a quick and easy way to make the file small enough for upload.
On a 1GHz G4, iSquint can convert most video files to iPod-screen-sized videos in realtime. Intel Macs are up to twice as fast, and can convert videos upwards of 5x realtime – the NMC has Intel Macs!
iSquint supports MP4 and H.264 encoding (better quality). DivX and XviD AVIs, all forms of MPEG video, and many other formats QuickTime chokes on are supported.
http://isquint.en.softonic.com/mac
OS: Mac only
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