Here's one more student video from the first class. No one from the second class was interested in posting their work. (hmmm…) That's one of the problems with many students these days…they don't see their work as having purpose or life beyond a given class. Perhaps that's just teaching art in a liberal arts setting where most of my students will only ever take one art class…but that's a discussion for another post. Here's the last video. This time on Vimeo since it exceeds the 10 minute limit set on YouTube:
Yesterday, I had final critique for one of my two Digital Media I courses (second one is tomorrow, Friday, morning). Overall, I was pretty pleased with their work. Several of the groups were proud enough of their work that they wanted to share with the world, so we spent a little extra time after critique encoding and uploading their videos to YouTube. You can watch them here:
Addendum: One video didn't upload (YouTube has a 10 minute maximum!) I'm going to try to re-encode it tomorrow and post it to Vimeo. Maybe I'll get a couple of others out of the second class as well. So, more coming!
A couple of months ago, a some friends and I started a writing group. We haven't been able to meet again due to holidays, scheduling, etc, but we should sometime soon. I've been meaning to post the piece that I wrote for weeks, so here it is finally.
I was pretty pleased with it (considering I wrote it in less than an hour). I've been mulling it over since then, trying to decide if I want to develop it into a longer piece. So, if you read it, let me know what you think!
I meant to share this story when I first wrote up the original post on my student's Arduino projects, but I forgot to put it in there. Something that flew past in the Twitterstream today reminded me of it, so I figured I'd share now…better late than never…
It seems that one of my students, a young female undergraduate, went to a local branch of Radio Shack to purchase a few components for her project. After browsing through the few (and rather under-stocked) drawers that they have at our local store, she went up to the counter to complete her purchase. There, she was waited on by a middle-aged white man who, as he rang up her items, looked up at her and posed this question: "Do you even know what these things do?"
I give that student credit for not ripping back into the guy. She simply looked him in the eye and said, "As a matter of fact, yes I do." I wish she had added "Do you?" After dealing with some of the sales help at local Radio Shacks in various cities across the country in recent years, I can say that a positive answer would not have been assured.
Trying to get the kids to wear helmets when cycling is never an easy thing. And I'm not the best example either. Don't think the boys quite old enough to appreciate these helmets (they prefer dragon and flame graphics), but I think these Yakkay helmets pretty cool for the urban (ad urbane) cyclist.
Just read a really interesting article from the November issue of Wired Magazine on open source hardware. The lead-off is all about the Arduino, big props to Massimo Banzi and his group. I was a little disappointed that the article doesn't explain Arduino's relationship with Processing. I would think that part of Arduino's success is precisely that relationship and the early market of users Arduino found in the Processing community. There was definitely a need for easy-to-use and inexpensive microprocessor units that Arduino fills but having an entire community of programmer already using the language needed to program your hardware certainly didn't hurt!
The rest of the article talks about several other open source hardware folks like Limor Fried (Adafruit) and David Rowe, discussing the business model of open source hardware. I think the moreThe interesting point here is the use of the hive-mind…collective intelligence….whatever you want to call it…to solve complex problems or to simply improve a project more quickly that any one hacker could do by themselves…sounds a lot like an academic art studio should work…
One More Student Video
