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What are all of the terms and genre defying categories which are emerging – a few I’ve collected and researched:

Digital Story – a generic term for stories produced and shared by digital means.  It tends to include image and audio, not just a word processed version of the story.

Transmedia – Stories which cross genre, medium, and type.  For example a television show which has some of the plot developments play out on a website, or in a game.   The term was described by Jenkins (2003) in his work Transmedia Storytelling who looked from the perspective of Hollywood and the media and how they can build a depth of character development and use it as a marketing opportunity to build a franchise.

via writing.trailsoptional.com

Early post from Jen Deyenberg’s new blog Writing and the Web which will collect her research, ideas, and inspirations for the last stage of her Masters in Education (announced here: Writing and the Web « Trails Optional)
I am looking forward to seeing posts pop up in my reader.

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With more open tools it is easy to gather, mix and redistribute information, blogs, wiki updates, podcasts, flickr, del.icio.us etc. can all be mashed with existing tools or a bit of scripting. Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

Or am I missing something?

via johnjohnston.info

I posted this originally in 2007: Facebook – John’s World Wide Wall Display getting something of the same feeling about Google Plus but perhaps it is early days.

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I’ve been aware of the Primary Games Arena 1 for a while. I only noticed yesterday that it had an API The api lets you search for games and returns some xml. XML makes me think of Glow 2. Glow handle xml quite nicely, unfortunately for most teachers this needs a knowledge of XSL, which I do not think is common. I’ve managed in the past to figure out way of displaying RSS using XLS so though I’d try to do the same with the Primary Games search results. It turned out to be pretty straightforward as the xml returned by Primary Games is nice and simple.

Displaying a set of Primary Games in Glow

Glow xml Webpart Empty

You use the xml webpart. This part has 4 main fields: xml link, xml editor, xsl link and xsl editor, of these you only use 2, using either the link the direct editor field for both xml or xsl.

The way it work is that the xml is loaded and modified by the XSL. The XML webpart can be usefully used to display any html fragment without any XSL at all, but in the case of RSS or xml from the primary games arena it need to be formatted.

For example the url:
http://primarygamesarena.com/
searchapi.php?q=money
in the XML Link field produces an XML list of games tagged money. Clicking that link will show you what you would get in glow if you do not use XSL, not pupil friendly at the moment. We can use XSL to transform this. As a first test I used this xsl in the XSL Editor field.

This produces this: (click for flickr page):

primary games in glow

On the glow page the images launch the Primary games page with the game in an iFrame.

It then becomes simple to repeat this for other searches and give pupils sets of games, just replace money in the xml link with another word.

We can also pass around webparts already loaded with the xml address and the xsl and these can be imported onto a glow page. Here is a the money one. You could import that onto a glow page and just change the search string at the end of the url to get a different set of games to display.

Taking it a bit further

After doing the above brief test with glow I asked @johnmclear, one of the folk behind Primary Games, if there were any other parameters that could be used on the search, this is what I got back:

johnmclear
John McLear

@johnjohnston can add it. Email me an ideal request/response
Sat Jul 09 12:19:28 +0000 2011 from HootSuite captured: Mon, 11 Jul 11 16:11:04 +0100

A few hours, a couple of email and some tweets later John had updated the Primary Games API to include subject, year, keystage, topic, unit and gametype!

This man we can now use, for example: ?q=money&y=3&g=Strategy as a query and get all the money games suitable for year 3 (=primary 4 in Scotland) that are categorised as Strategy games.

Of course the API can also be used outside Glow on the web via php. Here is a page that lets you search and display games: Primary Games Arena API and here is the Source.

I’ve extended this a little to create a page that can search and display games in the same way but also supplies an embed code to embed the code on webpages, blogs or glow.

Primary Games API with Embed codes

To embed in a blog you just need to switch to the html view in the editor and paste in the code. In Glow you can use an XML webpart and past into the xml editor field.

Simulation

Can you organise the planets in our solar system?

The embed code here was edited to make the background yellow.

Of course you could simply create a screenshot of a game page, upload it and make it a link, but this is quicker and loads the games inside the Primary Games ecosystem this has a nice wee toolbar allowing pupils to gain achievements by playing games, rate games anonymously and get links to other games. You also get the advantage of the folk at Primary games having already categorised a huge range of games suitable for primary aged pupils. Many thanks to @johnmclear for the extremely quick additions ot the API.

Footnotes:

1. Primary Games Arena run by Primary Technology an company who run a fleet of commercial and free ICT services for primary schools. ↩

2.When Glow was introduced I was one of the many folk who were very disappointed that Glow did not have tools for handling RSS: At the Scottish Learning Festival, on RM developer was asked about RSS and answered, ‘What is RSS?’! It turns out glow did and does support RSS and XML in general. ↩

The footnotes are a wee experiment to make my posts a little less verbose, I used a technique describe on Daring Fireball: About the Footnotes.

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I’ve been dipping into the stream of fun and information on the University of Mary Washington New Media Center Digital Storytelling Summer of Oblivion online course. Organised by Jim Groom it would be pretty hard to describe but it is producing lots of interesting stuff. A great way to spend a lot of time following links to posts that range wide.

Among the various weird and wonderful posts I found a series of website/blogs from the University of Mary Washington New Media Center which give a good introduction to basic Digital Media Tools:

I’ve also created a la list of these links on linkli.st: Digital Media · linkli.st. linkli.st is a service that make it easy (bookmarklet) to create & curate lists of links.

Update (a couple of hours later): I just found a wiki I put together last year covering some of the same ground: Digital Media.

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For the last year or so I’ve been running (supported by network support officers at every turn) a Podcast Producer server. This lets schools in North Lanarkshire publish audio and video very easily indeed.

Recently I’ve been testing the workflows that let you add, for example, and introduction or credit section automatically after the video is uploaded to the server (examples: Glow Blogs 3 Posting and Glow Blogs 2 Dashboard and Settings)

Podcast Producer does a lot of complicated stuff to do this, and uses some commandline applications in the process. One of these, pcastaction, is included in Mac OS X as well as Mac OS X Server. pcastaction can be used via the terminal to manipulate quicktime movies, it seem to be particularly useful for batch operations.

This evening, on the UK ADE mailing list, someone was asking about adding a logo image to a lot of movies. I did a couple of quick tests and found this can be done quickly with pcastaction.

Here is a quick set of instructions followed by a screencast. I am only a command line beginner but it is fairly simple stuff.

1. Create a plain text file (I use TextMate but TextEdit will do the same) containing the following: 

 #!/usr/bin/env bash

for FILE in ~/Desktop/movtest/*; do

   /usr/bin/pcastaction join --prb="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/movs/" --input1="$FILE" --input2="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/example.jpg" --output="$FILE".mov 
 
/usr/bin/pcastaction flatten --prb="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/movs/" --input="$FILE".mov  --output="$FILE"flat.mov 

done

where:

  • my video files are in a folder movs on my desktop.
  • The image UI want to add is example.jpg on my desktop.
  • My username on the mac is john

2. Save it as brand.sh (make it a plain text file if using textEdit not an rtf one)

3. open the terminal

4. type cd Desktop and hit return this move you to the Desktop where you can worm on the files

5.type chmod +x brand.sh and return this make the file executable(able to run)

6. type ./brand.sh this runs the file

you will see a lot of stuff speed past in the terminal.

After it finishes look in the movs folder:

for each file.mov that was there originally there will be a file.mov.mov which is a reference movie with the image added at the end and one named file.movflat.mov which is a self-contained quicktime movie and the one you want.

There will also be a folder Contents which you can delete, it was a folder used by pcastaction when working.

Here is a Screencast which may make thing a little clearer.

If you are a mac user, and have a lot of repetitive video task to do it might be worth having a wee look at pcastaction.

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Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads).

Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari. If possible, exporting your Flash animation as a SWF 5 file might give better results.

Google Swiffy looks good, support extends to flash five. Here is a swiffy animation created with Google Swiffy the original flash file, made by my daughter 11 or so years ago when she was in primary school is on the sam page, I can’t tell the difference.

Swiffy output and flash source

Works on an iPad, Safari, webkit, chrome, firefox on my mac.

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last week the number of Tumblr blogs surpassed the number at WordPress.com. But I think the more significant comparison may be with Twitter. Which, I think, may have peaked. Meanwhile, and possibly related, Facebook activity is down. I log in to Facebook one in a while, and then I am sure to log out, because I don’t want Facebook tracking me as I go around the internet

via downes.ca

Stephen Downes pointing to a new tumblr blog and short-medium-long form blogging.
My own tweeting is decreasing, partly due to spending less time being overwhelmed by twitter and more time in Google reader
I am trying to post here (John’s WWWD) a bit more frequently. Mixing normal posts with quick, but longer than twitter links, like this one. Some crude styling of these (via posterous posts) in place and to be improved.

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“Twitter seems to be reaching new people who will likely never get on board with RSS.”

This is true. But RSS will still be around when Twitter is dead.

– Open standards
– Decentralized
– Not owned by a private company
– Real URL’s instead of hashbangs

RSS is dead. Long live RSS.

via mjtsai.com

Comment by Chucky on Michael Tsai – Blog which quotes Brent Simmons‘ What we talk about when we talk about RSS . I am thinking a lot about RSS at the moment.

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River Tales

I am listening so some great pupil podcasts on Mr O’D’s class posterous pupils take on the role of a river and tell their life story:
Rachael does Rivers and
Kyle and the Nile for example. They show, in my opinion, the power of mashing up subjects and reinforce for me the value of podcasting and the voice.

Regular Gems

The User Outcomes section of Doug’s new Synechism Ltd. blog is turning up some nice stuff, this week’s gem for mac users is One Thing Well A weblog about simple, useful software.

UK Sound Map

I didn’t realise that the great UK Sound Map project was limited to a year and read:

The final date for uploads to the UK Soundmap is Friday 24 June, 2011. No new recordings will be added after then, but the UK Soundmap will remain online and you’ll still be able to listen to its collection of sounds.

I really meant to add a boo from work yesterday but got caught up in other things. There is a fair racket as the school, behind which I work, is being renovated. I had a good time contributing to the map and felt quite sad to learn it had finished. Visit the SoundMap and enjoy listening to sounds.

Listening to more podcasts

I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently thanks to Instacast. I’ve removed podcasts from the iPod app of my phone and don’t sync them via itunes anymore. Instacast allows you to build subscriptions (I imported from the iPod app before stopping the sync) and download episodes without being tied to a computer in a much simpler way than the ipod app. I can now sync my podcasts at the office before the drive home, rather than noticing that I had forgotten to sync my phone from my computer at home.

Instacast allows you to see the episodes you have downloaded, and also stream new ones. This can lead to a hammering of your data allowance.

I am presuming that with iOS 5 that apple will have some sort of similar setup too. It is certainly the way I want to go with mobile stuff.

The interface of instacast is nice, very minimal, although the text is a wee bit too small for my eyes at any distance. Well worth £1.19 even if Applce come up with something as good in iOS 5.

Islay high School

Joe Wilson blogs about Islay High School a reminder of all the great work going on there over the past few years. Good to be reminded that it is not the tech:

Beyond the technology they timetable 3rd to 6th year together – which leads to a great community feel in the senior school. This allows for personalised timetables over 3 or 4 years – this gives learners a large range of academic and vocational options and allows some to really stretch themselves – a few 5th years have achieved Advanced Highers.