1. Phone cameras are great. I use my phone camera more for taking pictures than talking to people. I am considering an upgrade, not because I need it, but because I heard the camera is even better. This funny picture with caption sums it up.
2. Google image search. I use it for lots of different purposes. I sometimes pluck images from the Internet, but forget to not where they came from. Google image search helps me find the source. If I am lucky. Not it this case. The image has been reposted way over 50 times, so that it would take some serious detective work to find the original. I wish Google had a function where you can list results by publication date.
Based on Jeff Brown’s Flat Stanley book illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, Dale Hubert, Grade 3 teacher in London, Ontario began the Flat Stanley Project in 1994. Flat Stanley provides the core for many literacy activities – drawing, writing, taking photos, sending letters and emails, etc. Similar to penpal activities, children send letters and flat visitors based on Flat Stanley or other characters from theTemplate Gallery: “it’s as if the sender and the recipient have a mutual friend, and writing becomes easier and more creative.” In 2010, Darren Haas, developed the Flat Stanley, a free app for the iPhone.
I know, there are too many babies and kittens featured on the internet. But I cannot help posting it, it is just so funny and interesting at the same time, watching those two little people having a conversation. A favourite YouTube video, together with classic “Charlie bit my finger”.
YES – The Big Art Project. Campaign concept and creative direction for broadcaster Channel 4’s initiative ‘The Big Art Project’. The series set out to create six pieces of art across Britain with the input of the general public. A 15ft typographic sculpture was designed and fabricated to represent the art that would be created throughout the series. The identity was used in print and and for 20, 40 and 60 second TV spots directed by James Griffiths.
Which reminds me, David Gauntlett has posted excerpts of his new book “Making is Connecting.” Looking forward to this.
Recently I found out by accident that I have far more subscribers to my blog than I ever imagined. I have not posted for a while, because I have been busy at other sites, but I was so touched when I found out, that I decided to keep posting at least once in a while some of the things I come across, even if I don’t have much time to write thoughtful comments. So here without much further ado a few things related to the educational potential of actions figures, all from a very different perspective. Im my research on superheroes, actions figures played a part, of course. Now here are a couple of videos: firstly, the Brontë Sisters Power Dolls, a must for anybody who loves Victorian novels!
Brontë Sisters Power Dolls
Secondly, Henry Jenkins on “Toying with Transmedia: The Future of Entertainment is Child’s Play” talking at length about actions figures. Jenkins argues such toys served children and young adults as “authoring tools” in stories that grew increasingly elaborate and technologically sophisticated over the years, spawning new kinds of play in our own time. Transmedia is not about “dumbing down popular culture,” Jenkins says. It involves complex mythologies that kids and adults can throw themselves into, with large casts of vivid characters in complex plots rivaling those in Russian novels. Transmedia storytelling also encourages children to “play out different fantasies,” Follow the link to see the video of his talk.Toying with Transmedia: The Future of Entertainment is Child’s Play | MIT World.
This was, kind of, what I wanted to get at in my MA thesis, but of course Henry Jenkins takes it a lot further and much more eloquently than I ever could.
Thirdly, here are David Gauntlett’s actions figures of famous theorists -Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault – Even though they are almost ten years old, they still makes me smile.
And did I say, that I recently dug out my son’s box of action figures and matchbox cars? (He had wanted to sell them on e-bay last year, but I got upset and I insisted to keep them myself if he did not want to. This summer, I started playing with them and my other new toy, the camera on my iPhone. I might post some of the results soon.
Brian Sutton-Smith wrote “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. To play is to act out and be willful, exultant and committed as if one is assured of one’s prospects.” in The Ambiguity of Play (1997) which I read a while ago and now I found it cited in Unlearning How to Teach, Creativity or Conformity? Building Cultures of Creativity in Higher Education by Erica McWilliam. And a brief further search brought up the image above here.
How do you visualize a concept, which implies a complex theoretical discourse and is also embodied in our experience, something such as structural violence?
Sometimes an image search will bring up a series of useful visualisations. Sometimes it is hard to find something that works, so you have to think laterally and that search may bring up new ideas of how to think about a phenomenon.
Here is what I have come up with for structual violence related to an educational context:
I am not sure yet, if this is what I really meant to say, but it is what I found to be expressive and telling so far. For some reason the images all include writing. Now I wonder, is this a concidence? Or does it say something about how language and literacy is used in power relationsships? Note to self: Read Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power and Foucault’s Diszipline and Punish.
I don’t play digital games, but I do like to play with digital tools. In the recent holidays I was playing around with some more poetry generators, which I found online.
My favorite outcome is this visual poem, which I created with the composer on RoboType. This is a great little online tool for creating visual poems with four classic types of font. “Robotype, a type comoposer, that allows playing with letters as graphic elements, exploring each one of the forms, something so extended as typography, draw, design, compose, create.” It allows you more control over the image than this concrete poetry generator which I posted about here. I guess, if you know how to use design software you can do things like this elsewhere, but I don’t, so I think it is a nifty little tool, and easy to work with so that it could be also used by children. (I just could not figure out how to upload images on the web gallery.) I hope I will find the time to use this generator more often.
The text is based on a quote by dadaist and later mystic Hugo Ball, from his “Dada Fragments” from 1916 “the image and word are one”. Visual poems have been created before, but the dadaists were this first group of people to really explore and experiment with words and letters liberated from their context. When I was a teenager two boys tried to woo me with poems, one used a medieval minne somg, the other one Kurt Schwitters’ Anna Blume. Dada won.
The poetry generator is based on a project, which turned Schwitters’ book Die Scheuche. Märchen (created with Käte Steinitz & Theo van Doesburg)into an online interactive story book, or game in Flash. You could say it is a very different kind of alphabet book. I would like to know what kids make of it.
“I met the girl in the paper dress on Manchester airport.” by Sigrid Jones
“Collage – the transformation and combination of image fragments to yield new images – has traditionally been regarded as a subversion of the photograph because it destroys the normal photograph’s strict, Aristotelian unities of place and time. A photograph shows what can be seen from a single fixed viewpoint, but a collage can combine multiple viewpoints or aspects of quite different scenes in a single image. Furthermore, a photograph shows things as they were at the precise moment of exposure, but a collage can combine things that took place at different moments into a single event. (…) It undermines our mental geography and chronology – our conceptions of where things are and when they happened. (…)
But physical collage of photographic fragments – by cutting and pasting, masking, airbrushing, rephotographing, multiple exposure, printing from multiple negatives, and the like – is usually technically difficult, time consuming and fairly easily detectable. So although it has had sucessful exponents, is has until now remained marginal to the practice of photography. The situation has changed dramatically with the emergence of the digital image: the tools for electronic collage of digital image fragments have become widely available, they are quick and easy to use and their application can be almost impossible to detect. (…) Just as execution of a brush stroke is a fundamental painting operation and exposure is a fundamental photographic operation, so selection, transformation, and assemblage of captured, synthesized, and drawn fragments to reconstitute the mise-en-image are fundamental operations on the digital image.”
from William J Mitchell (1992) The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambrdge, MA. MIT Press
I have been getting more and more absorbed with Flickr. For the next few days I will be at a digital games seminar called Breaking the Magic Circle in Tampere, Finland and I will give a presentation about my research with Flickr called “Playing with Flickr”. This is, by the way also the title a larger research project, which might turn into my PhD. In any case my prof is very happy with the proposal I wrote up. While I am researching as ‘participant observer’ I am also a fan of Flickr – here is my hommage to Flickr and its ‘squared circle’ group – an arrangement of images tagged with ‘magic circle’.
The last two decades have seen an increasing media convergence and the promotion and distribution of popular narratives through cross-media texts. The superhero genre forms an important part of children’s media environments and contemporary children’s culture, in particular for boys. Children are not merely consumers of media texts, they are also actively engaged in a range of activities – fantasies, make-believe play, drawing, writing and other forms of meaning-making – reflecting, expanding and commenting on these media texts. Children as storytellers, players and artists draw upon familiar elements from superhero narratives, to create their own meanings. Children’s ability to move across media platforms and across modes of meaning-making with particular ease, may explain the phenomenal success of cross-media narratives such as superhero stories. The paper provides an overview into different areas of children’s participation in the superhero narratives within and without the context of formal educational settings and provides a longitudinal case study of one boy’s engagement with superheroes in his play and meaning-making activities. The paper calls for a re-evaluation of children’s media culture and cultural practices, including educational practices around superheroes.
Sigrid Jones (2006) Superheroes and Children’s Culture Dissertation submitted in part fulfillment of the requirements of the MA Media, Culture and Communication Degree of the Institute of Education, University of London. Winter 2006
Illustration by Lukas: Spiderman and Superboy save a Captured Girl
I am very pleased to say that my dissertation ‘Superheroes and Children’s Culture’ has been recognised by United Kongdom Literacy Association as an “outstanding piece of work” and the UKLA therefore decided to give the 2008 UKLA Student Research Award (Postgraduate) to me, which will be presented at the UKLA International conference dinner on Saturday July 12th in Liverpool. My husband Steve got very excited about this, and I had to remind him that this was not quite the Oscars, but nevertheless I would like to thank him for his encouragement, and David Buckingham, my supervisor for his support, and Guy Merchant and everybody else from the UKLA for awarding this price to my work, and most of all my son Lukas, for providing much of the inspiration and the fantastic data for this paper!
I made a tag cloud about the dissertation last year with the help of TagCrowd, which looks like this. Interesting, how the largest tags signifying the most frequent keyword in the paper correspond with the title of the paper.
I love these clever adverts from HSBC, displayed on Heathrow airport as you get off the plane. Especially coming from a distant place, one is very aware of Language, Meaning and Context.
