I made these cards based on the now famous British World War poster “Keep Calm and Carry On”, which is in the public domain. You can read about the history here. Rip-offs have become something of a meme. Mail artist and brilliant typographer Keith Bates created the font, based on the original poster series.
keep calm and mail art
love respect and mail art
please do not ever feed trolls
The last one ‘please do not ever feed trolls’ may come in handy, when confronted with internet trolls appearing in internet forums. You are free to use it, whenever you feel the need.
Sometimes I create teaching materials for primary school children. Usually they are in German, so not very interesting for this blog here. But this picture domino can be understood and used by all people who know the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The domino follows the events in the fairy tale, based on the Grimm version. The idea is, that every child has to narrate the next bit of the story, before they put the next domino piece down. Sometimes essential details have to be filled in such as the wolf devouring grandma and the little girl, but these story elements will rarely be left out anyway. So it is an exercise in sequencing and story telling. But I think it could be fun for grown ups too.
The graphics used are mostly from http://www.thenounproject.com or in the public domain. These images have been designed in the tradition of ISOTYPE and other signs, which are forming an international visual language in their own right. (Think of the signage on airports or the Olympics.) The image of Red Riding Hood is by Emma Pelling and can be found among many other educational resources at http://www.earlylearninghq.org.uk.
I am very much interested in developing Isotype-like icons for children, to be used in the context of literacy, or rather for developing multimodal literacy. I believe that abstracted and well crafted icons can be a stepping stone to alphabetic reading, as the reader has to make inferences. They also could help to communicate very efficiently to children of all languages, for example, in games or websites or other places. Of course this is happening already to some extent – children learn to read emoticons, icons and symbols in contextual menus of games. But I am sure there is more to be achieved.
The pdf is in German. The last page is meant to be a cover for a DVD storage box. I have been thinking a long time about the most practical and efficient way to store and organize learning games in the classroom. I have come to the conclusion that empty DVD covers without the DVD tray are the most simple and elegant solution. They can be stored on a bookshelf, next to books or with other DVDs, so they can be associated with both books and games. This way they can be easily retrieved and put back to where they belong. They are cheap. The boxes shut tightly, so hopefully cards and small game tokens will not be lost too quickly. The instructions can be written on the back cover and as they are protected, they will not be lost or torn. Where appropriate, a booklet or a game plan can be included (often DVD covers have little clips to hold the booklet down). For example, the story of Red Riding Hood could be provided with this game.
I am happy to borrow, steal and promote good teaching ideas and ideas for classroom organization from wherever they come from. However, I claim to be the first to use DVD covers for literacy learning boxes! Here is the printable pdf. You are free to use it. CC: BY-NC-SA
I have learned some tricks from “I work with Pages” – things that I tried to figure out for ages! And so I have been playing around with some free digital resources, which I have collected over time. Well, I may be no great artist, but it is fun.
As other people have said, the iPhone is actually not such a great phone, but I love the fact that I have a reasonably decent camera in my back pocket. This picture I took a while ago . It says what it is: BILD = image.
In 1775 Austrian Emperor Joseph II dedicated a large piece of land for the use of “all the people for their amusement and merry-making”. The park with baroque garden design is called Augarten and I live round the corner, and so it is close physically and close to my heart too. Over the years there have been various attempts to build on parts of the land, which have been for the most part thwarted. But since a few years, the City Authorities in liaison with private investors have been planning to build a large concert hall on one end of the land. Protesters have been squatting on and off for three years now. Political protest has become more playful and performance orientated in the last decade or so, for example in the form of flashmobs. But only in Vienna I guess, protesters would come up with the idea to do it in such style and in baroque style too. After some of the trees were cut down last year to prepare the ground for the building work the activists staged a funeral procession around Vienna. On May 1st, Labour Day, they arranged for a colourful protest procession in full regalia. You’ve got to love the dresses! Makes me think of the work of artist Yinka Shhonibare.
Also, they do the prettiest leaflets! I fear it will all be to no avail.
I love all the picture and comic books the children have produced in the winter term during the first phase of the research project “Media Education in Primary Schools”.
This year I will be presenting some of my research into teaching media literacy/multimodal literacy in primary schools, based on results from the MIVA Project on the following international conferences:
„Key Concepts revisited: Teaching Teachers about Media Literacy“ as part of the Symposiums: Teaching Media Literacy in Primary Schools at UKLA International Conference 1010 „The Changing Face of Literacy: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,“ Winchester, 9.-11. July 2010
Abstract: Teaching Media Literacy in Primary Schools
I will also be presenting at some national conferences and seminars, for example at the Bundestagung zur ganzheitlich-kreativen Lernkultur an der Sekundarstufe 1: BMUKK und in Zusammenarbeit mit der Pädagogischen Hochschule Wien, 27.-28.09.2010. Looking forward to it all.
I made another visualisation of a quote by Hugo Ball, in German “Das Bild ist die Mutter des Wortes.” (the image is the mother of the word.) on RoboType.
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 thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
e e cummings
This spring and summer I made some pictures in the Austrian country side (in the Weinviertel). Today I found a lovely poem by e e cummings to go with them.
I made some visuals for an upcoming class/ presentation. It is ridiculous how much time I spend sometimes just for creating one slide. But I guess it is all worth it, at least for those students, who are like me and really like well made visual pesentations.
“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 cannot help it, I love playing with little online gadgets like Adletters’ Restaurant Sign Generator I used some words from an essay by Elise Seip Tønnessen’s on “Learning how to read and write in a multimodal environment.” Here is the full quote:
“In his book Introducing social semiotics Theo van Leeuwen (2005) presents concepts for describing multimodal cohesion in terms of rhythm unfolding in time, composition unfolded in space, information linking and dialogue. The concept of information linking is particularly useful for dealing with the relations between words and images. Inspired by Roland Barthes classical distinction between anchorage and relay (Barthes, 1980), van Leeuwen applies concepts from M.A.K. Halliday’s text linguistics when he states that the relationship between images and words may take two basic forms: elaboration or extension. In the case of elaboration we find two kinds of specification: The image may make the words more specific by illustrating them, or the words may make the interpretation of the image more specific by anchoring it. Another form of elaboration is the explanation, where the words paraphrase the image or vice versa. The information linking characterized as an extension may also take three forms: If the content of words and image is similar, we have a similarity (and in reality no extension, but rather an increased emphasis on the same content). Furthermore the content of words and image may contrast or complement each other. In the latter case, we find what Roland Barthes characterized as “relay”.”
Elise Seip Tønnessen (2008) Learning how to read and write in a multimodal environment. Paper for the conference Designs for learning, Stockholm March 2008, Department of Nordic and Media Studies University of Agder Kristiansand, Norway
This neat little online application may in come handy for the visualizations for ideas. I have used tagcrowd instead of abstracts, and as an introduction to a presentation, and I will experiment with wordle next. Here is a visualization of the abstract of the research project, which I am about to start in October.
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
word and image 
