Turning the Supertanker

I found an e-mail in my inbox on Monday from Rochelle Jensen from the University of Waikato.  she had stumbled accross the Tohatoha blog that Helen and I have been collaborating on.  She wanted to include it on her wiki.  This wiki is a place where all kinds of innovative ICT practice has been shared by New Zealand teachers not to mention some international initiatives that Rochelle has put up there too.  You can visit her blog and her wiki of collected resources via these links.  Check them out, there are some neat ideas.

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I think that I have found the ultimate bandwidth killer!  This little utility from Mogulus is yet another brilliant tool and is yet another reason why I will need a fibre cable as thick as my arm to feed my school pretty soon! 

What this cool utility allows you to do is to create your own web based TV station.  What is more it is live.  The image that you see above is my live stream embedded into my blog that I use to test things on.  As you can see my station has its own name - Madfish which is now part of the Madfish Broadcasting Corporation!  I have a ticker and all sorts of other goodies that I add or remove.  The terminal that I log into enables me to cut between live feeds and pre-prepared video footage, just like the editor up in the gallery would do in a real TV station.  It is really cool, I can see huge potential for this in education, I now need some willing classroom to take it on…

I have been looking for this kind of utility for ages, I have investigated VLC media player and while that is good and can handle a live feed within my network, what I have wanted to achieve is a live feed to the Internet.  It is my aim to set up bird feed stations in our gully so that we can share our wonderful natural resource with others from all over the world.  This cool utility will enable us to do that, we will be able to have several feed stations all linked into the one portal and our students will be able to cue between cameras to give our on-line audience the best images of the Tuis, fungi or whatever we are observing at the time.  I can see a future where students will be able to do scientific observations, statistical work etc through this portal and we can share the flora and fauna that our students are lucky enough to have within their school grounds.

Any takers for the stream?  Once I have set up a proper school TV station I will post the details here.  The future of education is not moving towards us, it is galloping! It had better hurry up, I can’t wait any longer!

I never cease to be amazed by the power of our brains. I have had two ‘aha!” moments today and both of them have the potential to produce some really creative work. Last night I posted the video by Michael Wesch and this afternoon as I walked home this idea popped into my head. As I sit here now, some hours later I now realise that my subconscious was chewing over what it saw, stylistically, on that video.

As I have said before, in a previous life I used to be an advertising photographer and I get my biggest buzz out of all this ICT stuff when I can be creative and when I can encourage others to be equally visually creative with all this plastic, electronic micro circuits and expensive software. As I have also said I often walk to and from school, it is a 10km round trip. I also cycle to work, the long way and that is 13km each way. Stay with me here this will all come together in a moment. What I liked about Michael’s video, stylistically was the movement, the transition from desk to library shelf and from library shelf to card index. This mix was slushing around my brain as I walked home in the drizzle tonight admiring the varying gardens, shrubbery, horses and wildlife that I encountered on my way home. Sometimes life in a car is just too fast and too isolated. Then the idea began to form in my head. The daily grind of commuting is an international phenomenon, it transcends cultures, social strata and ethnicities. Implicit within the word ‘commute’ is an assumption that we all do it in broadly the same way. But is it not better to travel than to arrive? I walk to work the exact same way that I drive, yet I see and experience more as I walk than when I drive, obviously. What a shame.

So here is the challenge and I think that it could be expanded to students after we have ironed out a few technical challenges. I propose that we all grab a laptop and a webcam, install Timershot (Sorry have not yet tracked down the Mac/open source equivalent yet.) and set our webcams up in our cars, on the bus, on the train, in my back pack and record our commute to work, or from work, it is your choice. I suggest that we set it the web cam to record every 1 second and then submit our videos to teachertube and link them back to this post in a comment. I will then create a post or a new blog to showcase these differing ways that we commute and the landscapes that we travel through.

As I said I will either strap the web cam to my shoulder as I walk or to the handle bars of my bike. As I sit here I can think of Helen in Plymouth who takes the Torpoint ferry from Cornwall to Devon every morning to get to school. My sister takes the train from the Hutt valley into central Wellington to Athena every day. I guess I am hoping that we will create a real version of those Air New Zealand ‘amazing journeys everyday‘ adverts, without the accompanying dirge!

I hope that I have inspired some of you to record this most mundane of activities. I suspect that we all make amazing journeys every day, but are too isolated in our cars or concentrating on some aspect of our work to really notice. I think also that if we got our students to do the same exercise we would learn a lot about them too.

What do you think? Who’s in?

Photo credit: Keithlard