Yesterday I had the fortune to visit the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While I am far from an art buff, I remember learning about some of her paintings in Junior High art class, and feeling an affinity for her work. Of course, I have seen her paintings reproduced in books, magazines, and online. They do not compare to seeing the actual work. Kahlo was able to create a sense of physical depth in places that made the figures seem like they were sticking out of the frame. At one painting in particular, I put my head next to the wall to make sure what I was looking at was in fact only 2-dimensional. I have experienced this effect at other art exhibits. This is something that I have never seen with a photograph, or any reprint of a painting.
This got me thinking....
When I think of most art these days, my thoughts immediately go to the digital. Even if it is something created by hand, my first idea would be digitize it, put it online. It almost didn't seem real to me if it is not published online. I think that attitude of mine may have changed yesterday.
I already mentioned above that all the qualities of the original paintings can not be captured or reproduced, but there is more.....
A section of museum was dedicated to photographs from Kahlo's personal photo albums. While I feel these probably could be reproduced rather faithfully, I found myself absorbed by the these photographs in a way that I probably wouldn't be if they were digital displays. Some of the photos were torn. Some of the photos had handwritten notes or doodles added to them. Not only were the frozen images enabling me to peer through time, but knowing that these actual prints had travelled through time as well made the experience that much more powerful. The physical size of the prints also had an impact: straining to see the small ones, seeing the details and texture of the paper on the larger ones.
I wonder what will live longer: the pictures I upload to flickr and my blog, or the pictures I print I store in albums. If I were to suddenly be gone, what happens to my digital pictures?
With the exception of a few experiments with film, I don't think I have printed a picture since 2001. Really, all of this is to say that in addition to uploading every picture I take to flickr, I am going to make an effort to print the select ones. This really dovetails nicely with my latest adventures with photography. Most of my photography experience comes from the days before the DSLR. In addition to high school english, my dad taught photography classes. I never wanted for a SLR, various lenses, dark room equipment. I spent a lot of time with these in high school and college, but then slowly fell out of practice, probably because I became enamored with the immediacy, the informality, the sharability, the unpretentiousness of point-and-shoot digital. I recently pulled out the film camera, lenses, flash. I am going to see if I keep up with it for a while. If I do, I will consider investing the money in the digital equipment. Unfortunately, I don't think any of my lenses will work with modern cameras.
Digital has tons of advantages. I still plan to share my pictures digitally. I also plan to make some prints. The photo printing services that tie into flickr or the book print on demand service like lulu.com show a strengthening marriage between physical and digital media.
Another topic of interest: The social aspect of everyone gathering in meatspace to experience Kahlo's works.
I am working my way through Eternal Sonata on xbox 360. I feel compelled to mention this because of the game's rather unconventional setting. It takes place in the dreams of Fredric Chopin on his deathbed. The gameplay is a pretty typical japanese rpg style, with a few enjoyable twists. The game is broken into chapters, and in each chapter you are given rather wordy explanation about some aspect of Chopin's life. While you play you can see facets of chopin's experience manifest themselves in the dream world. The game has great elaborate visuals and awesome music. If you like the gameplay of typical turn-based RPGs (not for everyone, I know) then I would recommend it. I am having a lot of fun with the game, and I am learning a little bit about an important composer and 19th century European history.
That is all.
I attended today's tweet meet at the golden wok. Great to meet some new people from around the University that are in to thinking about online community. I would say about half the people there I had not met previously, and did not follow on twitter. Twitter continues to catalyze new relationships. This was some real social networking.
The discussion opened up some branching thoughts. As always, I find the revelation comes someone puts into simple words something that is so intrinsic it is not easily verbalized. James Howell mentioned that he started using facebook to friend the students that he advises because he found that interacting in facebook was less intimidating for them than using email. When communicating with someone through facebook, larger identity is more naturally carried along with the message. As more and more of us become accustomed to crafting our own online identity as well as parsing the online identities of those we interact with, receiving an email message may seem cold and faceless.
There was also some talk of separating one's professional identities from one's more familiar identity. I think there is definitely some room for overlap, especially in light of the idea above. I am not saying that maybe different views into one's life should be offered, e.g. a view tailored to colleagues vs. a view tailored to friends. However, creating an impenetrable wall between the various aspects of your online self may one day soon be widely perceived as inauthentic.
It was great getting to meet everyone. Hopefully more events like this are to follow.
A cake to celebrate online communities. Thanks, Yvonne!
I just sat in on a presentation by Loanne Snavely and Ellysa Cahoy of the University Libraries on the topic of using blogs@psu as a platform for faculty e-portfolios. Happily I was available to answer some of technical questions the audience had, but more importantly Loanne and Ellysa opened my eyes to just how much utility the blogs@psu can have for faculty. I am really inspired to roll out some the new features that have been germinating for so long.
Some choice (to me, at least) ideas from the presentation:
- Portfolios can include reflection on teaching and research. The root of much reflection is transient, an insightful interaction with a student in class, for example. If these insights are not captured, they disappear. Think more traditional blog as a repository for this content.
- E-portfolios provides easy access to electronic and multimedia achievements.
- If you are using a web site as part of the promotion and tenure process, you want something more static than a typical blog - static front page, no comments. Items from the "more fluid reflections blog" can be selected to move to the portfolio site.
- permalink is a great feature - allows you to easily point someone to a specific item in the portfolio.
This all tells me that we are doing at least some things right with what we are providing with blogs@psu. It is a good feeling. A blog is not just a blog.
PSU jabber server in alpha/beta
Check it out. I think this is really useful. IM has become such a popular communication tool around the office. It makes a whole lot of sense to start using a tool where it is easier to find users, is supported, and is secure.
I find myself today attempting to digest the massive amounts of content that was generated from Saturday's TLT Symposium. There is a ton of great gems, both raw and refined, to mine from this mountain, and I am sure I will be at it for some time to come.
Lawrence Lessig's keynote was tremendous, as one would expect. I feel it succeeded in getting a lot of us thinking about new forms of expressions in the digital age. The one thing from his keynote that really tickled me was his use of the word "conversations" to describe the back-and-forth of internet content mashup fads (the kind of thing I attempted to describe in this post on LOLcats). I have never been able to quite put my finger on why I find this content form so fascinating, but just using that simple word put things in a little more focus for me. I still can't quite express my thoughts on this fully, yet. I really think what we see today is the nascent form of something that will be much bigger.
After the format of the day last year conspired against us getting much traffic at the hands-on tables, we were a little taken aback by large turnout for the hands-on room this year. We had to turn it into more of a presentation-style session on the fly. There were too many people for us to work one-on-one.
It was a great day, got to meet a lot of brilliant people, and finally got to speak in person with some whom I have previously only dealt with online. Just absorbing the high energy level of so many people makes the day worth it.
Hashtags, which I have not used before this event, totally impressed me. Check out the hashtags page for the symposium. Such a great way to pull together the tweets about the event and create an archive. Checkout the sidebar that pulls in pics, video, and blog posts using the same tag. Even though this site was mainly created around twitter, it really becomes a dashboard of sorts for all the media being generated. The tool hits both notes: simple, powerful. For me, twitter has been the lynchpin for finding info about the symposium. I wonder if more and more, with twitter being tied more deeply into the fabric of our lives, it will become the instrument for organically growing collections of content around various events and causes.
Take a look at this page at wordpress-powered ETS website. See the related resources links at the bottom of the page? They are automatically generated based on tags.
Now, take a look at the animation on the blogrovr site (found via Jeff Swain's twitter stream).
Imagine if you could choose to get an overlay like that when looking at a PSU blog, to find related posts from across blogs at psu. So when looking at my post about the 2008 TLT symposium, you could also see a little sidebar pointing out other posts about the tlt symposium?
Does this make any sense to do this for blogs@psu? Why not use tools out there, like technorati, that search the entire internet? Why make users have to use the PSU service to play? Why limit related content to just what is at PSU? Perhaps there is an interest in focusing on what is happening at PSU. Perhaps this could be a tool to foster communities at the University. Functionality like this would interact with any other kind of aggregation, social rating, cross-blog community functionality that gets developed.
Brad manages the programming group in Education Technology Services.
Recent Comments
COLE W. CAMPLESE: I wonder about how I could find the cycles to stay
Brad Kozlek: I can't argue with that, John.
John Larkin: Hi Brad The eCard is a nice thought. It was indee
rb smail: Funny how difficult it is to get it all down into
KIMBERLY WINCK: Hi Brad and all!
Richard J. Marshall: In addition to flicker, two sites that I use on a
COLE W. CAMPLESE: Hi!
COLE W. CAMPLESE: I think it is terrific. I like the fact that it m
COLE W. CAMPLESE: This is a great idea. I do it all the time in Fli