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October 15, 2007
The Dragon Ate My Cameraman
"Wanted: film production assistant with sufficient power to ward off attacking monsters. Must be able to resist shooting fireballs at your mortal enemy while we are on location."
An amusing Washington Post article discusses the challenges of creating a movie using an online environment for your set. These filmmakers are creating 'machinima,' or movies that draw from, or are set in, online virtual worlds like World of Warcraft. They have discovered that, in some cases, they have even less control over their set than they would have filming in the 'real world.'
The project, the joys, the challenges,and the surprises: full article by Mike Musgrove:
"Shooting a Movie in a Fantasy World..."
Posted by hag at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007)
In the early 1990s, when we were juggling laserdiscs, hypertext, CD-ROMs, gopher, and wondering if this thing called the web would ever take off, the big question was how would all this translate into educationally useful models and materials. The technology continues to change, the big question remains the same, but one of the people who provided concrete examples of what was possible is now gone.
Roy A. Rosenzweig was one of the authors of the "Who Built America?" CD-ROM,* a wonderfully rich example of the power of that new media applied to education. It used an expanded textbook model that incorporated images, primary source surrogates, and a well-written text, and became a model for what digital history could be. Perhaps more importantly, it was an eloquent and tangible example of how the digital could be applied to help the study of history. It was one thing to indulge in the usual theoretical musings or 'future talk' about the power of technology, how it would change reading, writing, publishing, teaching or learning, etc. but to be able to pull "Who Built America?" off the shelf and actually show someone the possibilities was a far more powerful way of engaging with these issues.
Rosenzweig went on to start the Center for History and New Media, which continues to explore the application of the digital to the historical. Through this and his articles and publications, he proved to be an effective and inspirational advocate for digital historians. The tributes and comments now appearing are testament to his influence on digital historians. He will be missed.
*Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914. Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Joshua Brown, American Social History Productions. New York, NY: Learning Technologies Interactive/Voyager, 1995. CD-ROM. PC and Macintosh.
Posted by hag at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
October 5, 2007
We won't write it for you but...
ResearchBitch.com offers a service to "do the drudgery of research for you." Claiming that they use a "patent pending search technology -- there is nothing quite like it on the web," they will take an assignment, a phrase, a page, or any block of text, up to 1,000 words, feed it through their search process, and return a list of sources for you to read.
For those of us who find the research to be the best, most fun, part of any project, this approach sounds off-putting. For those of us who are interested in the murky continuum between original scholarly work, plagiarism and paper mills, this site provides more fuel for discussion. It appears that all the sources found by Researchbitch are being drawn by way of Google, so for those who decry student use of Google as a sole search option, that fuel for discussion might be quite combustible.
What do you think? Should researchbitch be seen as evil incarnate, or as a reasonable place to jump start your research?
Posted by hag at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 1, 2007
Conference: Distributed Ignorance and the Unthinking Machine: The Challenges of Teaching History and Computing
Under the rather provocative title, the Association for History and Computing, UK branch, has gathered a day-long conference that explores the role and uses of information (computing) technology in higher education history teaching and research.
Of particular interest is where such things as digital history methods belong. Should they be taught? At what level? How? Should students be 'absorbing' this information on their own? How will students, when they become researchers and teachers, know how to apply digital history methods if these skills are not taught?
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/confweb/2007/conf07.htm
Presentations include:
- Postgraduate Research Training and ICT: the Roles of Computing in the PhD
- How do you know it is true? Digital Diplomatics for the History Syllabus
- Using ICT in degree-level history teaching: issues of progression and differentiation
- 'It's not what you know it's the way that you know it' - key skills in history and computing
Posted by hag at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)