24th February
24/02/09 13:00
Experimentation in walking and blogging - Thoughts about the Silver project and Bridgeman Art Library - Update on the Sydney Gardens project - Brief thoughts on the Sky project
OK, up a hill again, different experiment this time working with the zoom audio recorder rather than with the iphone. This will record an MP3 file directly onto an SD card which might make it a a bit simpler to get it onto the computer. Still would like to try and get some transcribing going. We could try this one with iListen and see if that would work. It is possible that walking up the hill breathlessly and into the wind is not the best form of audio to transcribe.
OK, thinking about the second part of the project or a second thread to it which is the Silver project, along with the Bridgeman Art library. the Bridgeman Art library is just a monumentally huge collection of images on all sorts of different subjects the Bridgeman Art library in connection with a commercial company, with some government sponsorship, quite a lot of government sponsorship to create resources for use in schools, presumably these would end up being subscriber based, and they are basically classroom activities that make use of the Bridgeman Art library collection At the moment the organisation are producing prototypes and they have asked a group of teachers to come and consult they asked me whether I would consult for them. This will be a series of 7 r 8 days in London over the next year where we go down and brainstorm about what they are doing as a group along with a lot of online brainstorming ideas. I am not quite sure where I fit in yet as an art teacher because an awful lot of what I do in the art room is not directed, I have a very vague structure and a very vague idea and I then let the children free to exercise the creativity - their creativity, so I am not entirely sure about the structure here, but we will see. My first ideas, we were asked to comment or put a comment on their first prototype. The comments seemed to be about this area between freedom, creativity and structure. I found an article on the internet based around the idea of on line resources and flexibility based on the architect Alexander, and how he created plans for new cities that gave the city structure gave the planing structure, even individual building buildings had a sort of structure, but allowed for individual creativity within that and this thesis that I read on line was based on how that structure which might fit into online learning resources. The next thing they sent us about 3 or 4 hundred images from the Bridgeman Art library on the theme of basically around the theme of the Olympics, so these where a lot of photographs of London historical shots more than modern, a lot of photographs of industrial London, the great exhibition, the Great Western Railway and a lot of shots of Olympic subjects from images on Greek vases through to the Nazi Olympics through to Barcelona, Beijing, etc. And at the moment they are just a collection of images for us to comment on. so my plan this morning is just to hand these images on to my U4th group and see what they can do with the images and with comic life, to put some sort of story to-ether, possibly on a theme around the Olympics or possibly just on a theme inspired by the images themselves. So I think that that will be my bit of research for this one, I am also going back over to Bath today to talk to the Holburne Museum and I have looked very briefly at mediascape, looking to get ideas for what I could do with soundscape and mediascape., That is very early yet, we have just completed a project proposal to try and get some funding. i need to know if I will be able to use the ipaqs from HP, and I would need to get some funding I think to put OSX onto my laptops and try and run Windows so that we can get the mediascape onto a number of machines. I also need to think about audio recording devices, maybe we could get two or three like this so the recording would be made a bit more simple.
Thoughts on the seminar that I missed on the online gaming and pervasive media, the Sky project. I am not a gamer at all I have not done games. I can look at it a little from the outside in that I have a teenage son who was addicted to warcraft for a while, and when I was his age, just a little bit earlier, for a few weeks I got addicted to the first game - space invaders - so I can understand the addiction. But I find it very difficult to get my head into games scenario because I have have simply not done it - dungeon and dragons, or whatever, although I have students that have, and they lose themselves into it. And it maybe like computers themselves - I am just of a generation that are not literate in that area, not having grown up with it. Or maybe it is easy to understand. Does it have it’s own sort of protocols and language. like just getting into facebook, which took me a while. It just took me a while to understand what facebook is. Maybe that’s the situation of the young kids as well, or maybe they just do it and learn it very quickly, and once they have grasped facebook they move on with that technology.
OK, thinking about the second part of the project or a second thread to it which is the Silver project, along with the Bridgeman Art library. the Bridgeman Art library is just a monumentally huge collection of images on all sorts of different subjects the Bridgeman Art library in connection with a commercial company, with some government sponsorship, quite a lot of government sponsorship to create resources for use in schools, presumably these would end up being subscriber based, and they are basically classroom activities that make use of the Bridgeman Art library collection At the moment the organisation are producing prototypes and they have asked a group of teachers to come and consult they asked me whether I would consult for them. This will be a series of 7 r 8 days in London over the next year where we go down and brainstorm about what they are doing as a group along with a lot of online brainstorming ideas. I am not quite sure where I fit in yet as an art teacher because an awful lot of what I do in the art room is not directed, I have a very vague structure and a very vague idea and I then let the children free to exercise the creativity - their creativity, so I am not entirely sure about the structure here, but we will see. My first ideas, we were asked to comment or put a comment on their first prototype. The comments seemed to be about this area between freedom, creativity and structure. I found an article on the internet based around the idea of on line resources and flexibility based on the architect Alexander, and how he created plans for new cities that gave the city structure gave the planing structure, even individual building buildings had a sort of structure, but allowed for individual creativity within that and this thesis that I read on line was based on how that structure which might fit into online learning resources. The next thing they sent us about 3 or 4 hundred images from the Bridgeman Art library on the theme of basically around the theme of the Olympics, so these where a lot of photographs of London historical shots more than modern, a lot of photographs of industrial London, the great exhibition, the Great Western Railway and a lot of shots of Olympic subjects from images on Greek vases through to the Nazi Olympics through to Barcelona, Beijing, etc. And at the moment they are just a collection of images for us to comment on. so my plan this morning is just to hand these images on to my U4th group and see what they can do with the images and with comic life, to put some sort of story to-ether, possibly on a theme around the Olympics or possibly just on a theme inspired by the images themselves. So I think that that will be my bit of research for this one, I am also going back over to Bath today to talk to the Holburne Museum and I have looked very briefly at mediascape, looking to get ideas for what I could do with soundscape and mediascape., That is very early yet, we have just completed a project proposal to try and get some funding. i need to know if I will be able to use the ipaqs from HP, and I would need to get some funding I think to put OSX onto my laptops and try and run Windows so that we can get the mediascape onto a number of machines. I also need to think about audio recording devices, maybe we could get two or three like this so the recording would be made a bit more simple.
Thoughts on the seminar that I missed on the online gaming and pervasive media, the Sky project. I am not a gamer at all I have not done games. I can look at it a little from the outside in that I have a teenage son who was addicted to warcraft for a while, and when I was his age, just a little bit earlier, for a few weeks I got addicted to the first game - space invaders - so I can understand the addiction. But I find it very difficult to get my head into games scenario because I have have simply not done it - dungeon and dragons, or whatever, although I have students that have, and they lose themselves into it. And it maybe like computers themselves - I am just of a generation that are not literate in that area, not having grown up with it. Or maybe it is easy to understand. Does it have it’s own sort of protocols and language. like just getting into facebook, which took me a while. It just took me a while to understand what facebook is. Maybe that’s the situation of the young kids as well, or maybe they just do it and learn it very quickly, and once they have grasped facebook they move on with that technology.