Room With A View

The Globe and Mail has a story today regarding a Pennsylvania woman being allowed to proceed in a lawsuit against Universal Music Corp. Universal had YouTube remove a home video clip the woman posted which showed her baby dancing to music by Prince. Universal had YouTube take the clip down because Universal said it violated its copyright. The judge says maybe not and that Fair Use must be considered–good. I’m all for artists being paid but people should be permitted to fairly use the music they buy.

It struck me while watching Garr Reynolds on @Google that there are many presentations at my school that could be videoed, archived and then made available as podcasts or on YouTube. We often have guest speakers visit the school but it’s so busy around ISB that it’s hard to get to them. It would be great to make the presentations available via the web. It would be important to keep the process easy/streamlined like Google does so as to not make the process a time burden. It’s doable.

This is a tip for Mac users.

Lately, my son and I have been working on separate video projects. As a result, hard drive space has been at a premium. GrandPerspective is an open source utility that graphically shows what’s taking up space on a hard drive. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded goofy but after giving it a try it’s great. (Pictures work for me.) It showed me quickly what was taking up all the space on my drive. Some of the files I didn’t need and so just deleted them. Others I burned to dvd. I went from using 96 gigs on my hard drive to 55 in no time. It’s well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Bob LeVitus and Chuck Joiner at the MacNotables podcast for this.)

This article in the NY Times deals with the growing number of students in film schools even though few will get jobs in the traditional film industry. The reason for this? Film schools are

beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Ms. Elizabeth Daley, the dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television comments that

filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals.

She goes on to say that

“The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write
with media, and those who can’t,” Ms. Daley said. “Our core knowledge
needs to belong to everybody.”

We live in a media rich world. We need to recognize this in the way we teach and learn.

Thanks to David Warlick for getting me thinking this morning.

After my last post Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us I scrolled down to see that since the video was posted to YouTube a month ago, it’s been viewed 1,554,437 times. There have been 3,916 comments posted on YouTube. (That doesn’t included blog posts like this one.) And it’s been “favorited” 16, 583 times. That’s a bunch. When does a video on the web become mass media? When does it reach critical mass?

Can’t think of much to say except watch this.

The term Web 2.0 gets thrown around a lot. It’s the idea that people can create content and interact with one another. Some people love the term, some people hate the term, some people overuse the term, while others lay claim to the term. Regardless of the hype, The Water Buffalo Movie is what matters.

Robert Thompson read a blog entry by Philip Greenspun where Greenspun wrote about his frustration with a charity that supposedly bought water buffaloes for people. Robert Thompson lives in rural China. He offered to buy Greenspun a water buffalo and give it to a needy family. Greenspun took him up on his offer. The Water Buffalo Movie is Thompson’s account of the story.

I’m not a fan of video podcasts or vodcasts as some people call them. I enjoy listening to podcasts but watching someone sit in front of his computer and yak, just doesn’t work for me. That is until I discovered The Show with Ze Frank. I’m a little late to the party on this one.

Ze Frank is a humourist, satirist, musician, and web designer that set out in March 2006 to produce a video podcast each weekday for a year. I found myself at his site after reading a reference on a tech site. What got me watching his show was his use of his camera. Though Ze sits in front of his computer and yaks, the images are not static. Careful and quick camera changes make his work visually interesting. His sense of humour is what keeps me going back each day.

It has an “explicit” tag at Apple’s podcast directory so teachers will have to be careful which episode they use with students but it’s worth a look for those that have older students and kids using video. For those teaching media studies the following the show has garnered is fascinating. Fans of the show are known as “sports racers” and each show is introduced by a sports racer. Racers record their intros and send them into Ze’s wiki. Another phenomena is the sports racer Running Fool. Running Fool is making his way across the US by being passed from one sports racer to the next. He’s totally reliant on sports racers for his transportation and accommodation. It seems to be working.

Lively camera work, quirky humour and a new twist to audience participation make The Ze Frank Show worth a look. The whole thing may turn out to be no more real than The Lonely Girl but hey, it’s no less real than reality TV.

This Wired article is for film buffs everywhere. It’s a story about a company called DTS Digital Images and the man behind it all–John Lowry. Lowry and his company take old movie footage and restore it using digital film scanners and 700 Macs. The company’s list of restored films include the Star Wars trilogy, James Bond films, and many others.

As a teacher I especially enjoyed the last paragraph.

When asked how he landed here, Lowry’s expression turns serious. “I have dyslexia,” he says. “I didn’t read my first book until I was 30.” He pauses, and then smiles. “I’m a picture person.”