Digital Ether

This is a nice 3d game (http://armorgames.com/play/4998/starlight) that involves rotating the star scape to make pretty pictures. Good for 3D visualisation.

This session mostly covered the requirements and the administration of the course. There was also the holiday homework, which was an 1000 essay to research a piece of new or emmerging technology and how it affects the multimedia industry.

Things will quite down for a few months until orientation for next year, Year 11 students.

I’m also thinking of reorganising this blog

Last lesson we looked at making a Window’s based CD automatically boot, and adding your own unique icon.

Here the script I had on the board, which when placed in a text file called autorun.inf will cause the CD to autoboot;

[autorun]
open=ShellRun.exe index.htm Starting CD now..
icon=<myIconFile>.ico

The above will do the following;

ShellRun.exe index.htm will cause a web browser to open the web-page of index.htm in the root directory of the CD.  The text “Starting CD now…” should be displayed.

The CD will have the icon <myIconFile>.ico, also in the root doirectory of the CD.  NB: Please change the <myIconFile> to the name of the file you are using.

Here are the URLs with the info;

• http://www.phdcc.com/shellrun/autorun.htm
• http://www.cdmenupro.com/autorun_inf.htm
• http://www.cdmenupro.com/icon.htm

The Australian government is sinking a large amount of money into updaing our old national network. (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/aussies-announc/). Last year the OECD listed worldwide broadband Internet statistics (http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html).  Although the Australian newspaper answered with Broadband ratings lifted, having a go at the OECD report.  However, I think it’s long over due

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

This little tool takes a sketch, searches for similar images and creates an image.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/concentration/old-school-new-school.html

With the advent of introducing new technology in to the classroom there is a coresponding shift in what is taught.  The risk is that as teachers we may “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, lossing the good with the bad.

It seams to me that there is now a push to develop critical thinking in our students, where before it was assumed.  Two changes that have happened during that time is the Computer has been introduced into school and has become more common place at home.  TV, & the Internet are all piped into our homes and this is leading to information overload in many people including students.

We now seam to live in a world of constant distraction, unable to focus our attention on a single object for any length of time.  Although Computers are an extremely powerful tool for processing and creating information and media.  What is the effect of using them in the long term?

See “Too much Information?” on NineMSN’s Grazia for an excellent example is the Photoshop effect on our perception of reality.
Or this production piece for the second Twilight movie

An excellent write-up on copyright in Cory Doctorow: Why I Copyfight

And a website been sued for copyright violations. Join the Copyfight!