Saturday, April 21, 2012

New film: 'J-Journeys'



More video.

It's great having spent much of the past two months working on a project to then be able to knock a different one out in about an hour. This short film, the third to feature footage shot on my last visit to Japan, takes a leisurely meander through Japanese suburbia as seen from a bus and a train. It also features a great mellow piano tune by Chris Zabriskie, which under by the unlikely name of 'That Kid in the Fourth Grade Who Really Liked the Denver Broncos' (sourced from the Free Music Archive and issued under CC-BY licence).

The film is more of a mood piece than a story (in other words, nothing much happens), but I rather like the pace of it. However, over 4 minutes is probably a little long for a web video where not much happens!

I chose to debut this film on Vimeo rather than YouTube this time. No reason, and it'll find its way onto YouTube as well, but always good to get to know another platform better.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The coming wars on computing




This video is of a speech given by Cory Doctorow to the University of Westminister School of Law, and hosted by The Guardian as part of their 'Battle for the Internet' series. In the talk, Doctorow proposes that the so-called Copyright Wars are merely opening salvos in a wider coming (metaphorical) war on general purpose computing. 

For anyone that wants to be able to retain control over what they can or can't do with a computer (which these days means most devices used in daily lives), there are some very compelling arguments here.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Survey call: [Twitter + #IATEFL = ?]

The next essay for my MA is due in very soon. For this one, I'm investigating the use of Twitter at conferences, using this year's IATEFL conference in Glasgow (Mar 19 - 23) as the case study.

As part of the qualitative research into the topic, I have put a survey together for people that used Twitter for participating in the conference. If you used Twitter during #IATEFL, please help me out with a few responses below.

The survey should take about six or seven tweets worth of your time to complete, and will be open for responses for the next two days.

Thanks!





UPDATE: This survey is now closed for submissions. Many thanks to those that responded.