Category Archives: Creativity

Blade Runner – A classic cut restored

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I list Blade Runner as my favourite movie in my Facebook profile. So naturally I am pretty interested in the release of “Blade Runner: The Final Cut” on DVD.

IT’S been 25 years since the release of “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott’s science fiction cult film turned classic, but only now has his original vision reached the screen.

The film, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” takes place in Los Angeles in 2019. It follows a cop named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) who hunts down androids — or, in the film’s jargon, replicants— that have escaped from their slave cells on outer-space colonies and are trying to blend in back on Earth.

For the new director’s cut, the special-effects footage was digitally scanned at 8,000 lines per frame, four times the resolution of most restorations, and then meticulously retouched. The results look almost 3-D.

The story also takes on some new twists and turns , providing a darker perspective of future society – read more at the New York Times, and be sure to view the FilmFuture clip with Fred Kapplan’s commentary of the future as depicted in Blade Runner.

Likely to be an even more hypnotic and challenging movie! A media studies must!

Yes, via boingboing 😉

A directory of wonderful things

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For our schools it is time to take a well-earned break with the term 3 holidays now underway. So it’s time for me to have a bit of fun on this blog too before I get back to more serious matters….

Time to talk about wonderful things…boing boing style …. prompted by my lightweight breakfast reading of the Sun Herald (no, not my choice of paper).

An article there about a device that creates plates, bowls and other tableware on demand and recycles them (a Star Treck fan like me recognises this!) , produced as a prototype by MIT led me to comment “I bet they got that from boing boing!”

A little research showed me that Boing Boing listed the story Dishmaker: Printer for Dishes on February 12, which came from Gizmodo, who had linked to this story 12 months earlier at TreeHugger. Well, here’s a video about the earlier prototype…you are looking at the beginning of replicators for us all 🙂

By the way, boingboing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies, and is listed by Technorati as Number two blog in the world, with Engadget, the number one blog in the world, having replaced boing boing at the top.

Boing Boing is a ‘beaut’ blog full of eclectic news!

Today I read about a recent “in-world” labor protest that took place in Second Life. The company in question: IBM. The aggrieved: 1850 avatars, including some bananas and triangles. Link.

I discovered a beautiful Gallery of Illustrated Endpapers. What are they? Endpapers are the inside covers and facing pages of books. Today, endpapers are almost always blank. But our more sophisticated forebears made good use of endpapers by adding thematic illustrations to them.

Look at the endpapers here.

I also found out about a Terry Pratchett DiscWorld reading order guide; thought about the Walk to Rivendell challenge; and saw how mobile technology worked for a reporter in Myanmar who had had his camera confiscated.

There’s lots more to read on Boing Boing every day – so add it to your RSS reader! Lots of good ideas to provoke discussions in your classrooms.

Now, settle back and watch another video – Dice Stacking – reported by Boing Boing of course!

  • E-Learning 2.0 …that’s immersive and personal learning

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    Can’t say it better than Stephen Downes.

    I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.

    Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations – or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

    From Brandon Hall Research Innovations in Learning Conference, San Jose, September 25, 2007

    If you haven’t already done so, add Today’s News in OLDaily to your RSS reads.

  • Visions of the future…..

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    There is a wonderful online gallery of illustrations by Villemard from 1910 imagining what life would be like in the year 2000. It’s part of a larger exhibition titled Utopia: The Quest for the Ideal Society in the Western World.

    Check it out here.

    Thanks to the alert from Stephen’s Lighthouse.

  • Books and ideas: Mirror of the world

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    Thanks to the August edition of Good Reading (magazine for book lovers) I have discovered a new website Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas.

    This website showcases some of the State Library of Victoria’s most precious and historically significant books. It is a rare opportunity to look more closely at fragile medieval manuscripts, turn the pages of exquisitely illustrated picture books, zoom in on the meticulously detailed maps or even hear works narrated.

    There are four main themes to explore. Inspiration traces the development of books and their power to shape our history. Imagination illustrates the many ways in which books transport us into rich, inner worlds. Exploration charts the importance of books in documenting the discoveries of new lands, peoples, flora and fauna. Innovation looks at books as objects of beauty, artistry and agents of change.

    In addition, the Teach & Learn section (look for the link on the bottom bar) contains a series of educational resources for teachers and students. Based around items featured on the Mirror of the World website, the resources are organised into activities for students and accompanying information for teachers.

    Passion is the purpose….I knew that!

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    If you’re a teacher, especially if you are an ICT teacher ‘doing’ software or programming, then I have to share a ripping good read from Giles with you.

    You know, Giles realised something, that he says is specific to his own circumstance.

    I realised that what he wrote is a ‘must read’ for schoolies!

    We all have to think differently, and infuse our learning purpose with passion and diversity. Go on, read When the Beast is Born, and decide what class or staff meeting you will use this piece for a discussion starter 🙂

    Scratch media lab of your own from MIT

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    Thanks to the ICT Guy’s post about their professional learning day with Scratch – Creating Games with Scratch – I have been reminded to look into this great creative tool.

    SCRATCH is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

    Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

    Scratch is available free of charge, go to Download, and there are support documents available to get you underway.

    Help turn your kids from media consumers into media producers, with their next Scratch project!!

    Some new things about information distribution…

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    CreateSpace is the new name of Amazon’s on-demand self-publishing service for the super long tail of books, audio CD’s and film DVD/Blue-ray. Products automatically get an ISBN number(a huge draw-card) and are listed on Amazon.com, including “Search Inside” for books. This extends what is on offer, when compared to Lulu and other self-publishing sites.
    The National Archives in USA and CreateSpace will be publishing movies from its collection of over 200,000 public domain films, raising some interesting copyright issues i.e. will public domain files ‘go viral’ either online or via home CD copies?

    Getting into Google explains that Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

    Barry Shwartz reports that Bloglines released a new public beta of their popular web-based RSS reader. The new Bloglines beta is optimized to run well in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox.

    The new beta has several new features including a customizable start page with drag and drop AJAX functionality, three feed viewing options including a “Quick View,” “3-Pane View,” and a “Full View.” New enhanced AJAX drag-and-drop makes feed management and ease, plus a new “Unread System” that makes marking feed items clearer, quicker and easier.

    No need to worry, Read/Write Web has a comprehensive review of the new beta Bloglines, plus there is a lot of coverage at Techmeme. You can also read Gary Price’s write up at ResourceShelf.

    These three things – nice juxtaposition don’t you think?

    Blogging across the curriculum

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    Not to be outdone, students in Year 5 were busy today setting up their various group blogs ….. lots of giggles, ohhhs and demands to get started NOW!

    Kate is taking a different approach with her students, setting up a shared blog space for groups working on different topics, such as: Visual Ventures (electricity); Safety First (issues for different scenarios); New Concepts (cool maths problems to try and solve); Riddles & Poems; Religion (World Youth Day – the latest on the cross, and living the message of Jesus).

    goodkate.jpg

    I wish I could share the looks of wonder and excitement that I saw on these faces in every group. The focus and interest in getting further involved with blogging is interesting to see.

    Five Green Specials and all the students blogs are just getting underway, though it will take a few weeks to get these properly underway – as a new teacher is taking over from Kate soon who will be at home with her new baby!

    However, the kids in Riddles and more for English already have a couple of podcasts on their blog! Great work kids! I have a feeling that we will see (hear, watch?) beaut things happening on these blogs as the year goes on.

    But seriously, we have been able to explore quite a few different dimensions of blogging with Kate’s and Elizabeth’s class. It is great to be able to set up learnerblogs safely using gmail accounts that are an alias of the main account the teacher has set up to manage her classes blogs.

    It’s been very rewarding working with Elizabeth and Kate on establishing and expanding blogging ideas for their school – thanks for letting me share in the learning fun 🙂

    If you want to set up learnerblogs, and don’t want to let students loose on this using their own email addresses, then simply create an account e.g. myaccount@gmail.com. Then you are ready to create learner blogs with email alias accounts by using the plus (+) sign and name e.g. myaccount+student1@gmail.com; myaccount+student2@gmail.com. All the authorization and management matters related to your students blogs will come to the gmail account that you have set up.

    Read Doug Belshaw’s post about 8 things I like about Edublogs (and learnerblogs) to get some ideas if you are new to this. Doug also has a nice way to enter his teacher and student spaces at Mr Belshaw.co.uk– explore further to build your own ideas.

    Another Mashable “must have”!

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    I’ve been tracking with some interest the very useful compiliations that Mashable (social networking news site) has been putting together for addicts of anything Web 2.0. I’ve shared a few of them – and now I must share another!

    Flickr is back in the news this week with reports that it will add video. But we’re still loving the photo-sharing element: here’s a 100+ ways to get even more out of the popular photo site at Flickr Toolbox: 100+ tools for Flickr Addicts.

    I am now collecting all of my favourite Mashable “cool tools’ in my Del.icio.us account with a Mashable tag.   Jump in and enjoy.