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-Adriana

How Pickens Plan’s pickens social media

I just spoke to Joey Mornin, from YourRevolution and it’s really incredible what they are doing. In just two weeks these guy have delivered a formidable social media strategy (Joey has not slept 8 hours in the last week). Pickens campaign had no idea how good they had by hiring these young super powers!

The campaign has really moved into high gear making social media a core part of their strategy. But let’s not miss the BIG point here.

Growing pains of on-demand media

No one loses or wins in the battle of Netflix & Amazon on-demand streaming videos, says Betsy Shiffman from Wired Magazine. But judging by the reader comments, the Losers R US: the generation X/Y users.

We’re still so early in this on-demand content game that the technology is very poor and the usability is far from ideal. Sure, we’re doing it to spare our kids from this painful transition. Thanks to the persistent curiosity of our guinea-pig mind we are patiently trying out anything you throw at us in a shiny box (virtual or real) until you — content providers — get it right. Even with the economy failing, game sales are up 52% and overall electronics sales continue to show growth. You can thank us by lowering your prices and making better tech toys — that is better usability, energy efficient and visually pleasant with less cables.

Help me choose a new logo

How about a little crowd-wisdom here? Vote for your favorite logo below.

Click on each logo for larger view

I’m in the process of redesigning my blog. I’ve gone through a few rounds with some of my super designer friends who have been advising me on developing a logotype (a lot more work than expected for an amateur!). These are my top six. Now I gotta narrow it down to ONE and I figured I could get a little outside perspective.

Three rules to learning digital learning (part III)

Rule #3 Share it with an Audience

Another rule in The Five Obstructions is that Leth must show his films to Von Trier and be present for his critique (they drink champagne and eat caviar for every showing). Von Trier is Leth’s audience. The embodiment of his critic increases the pressure but also fuels Leth’s labor to impress his friend.

Three Rules to learning Digital Storytelling (Part II)

Rule #2 Find a Story you connect with

Throughout most of The Five Obstructions, it is unclear why Leth subjects himself to this tortuous exercise. But at the end we discover that this is a therapeutic process to help him come out of his depression and get in touch with his real emotions in the storytelling process. Von Trier wants Leth to produce something honest from his heart, not his head.

I only started making videos six months ago, and before that all my creative endeavors were creative writing, dancing and doodling. With these hobbies it was fairly easy to me to access my heart and enjoy the process. But in making videos, I got caught up in the gadgets, the software, the codecs, and more.

Three rules to learning digital storytelling (Part I)

Ever stared at the metaphorical white page in MS Word pondering what to write? In my second storytelling class I learned that the biggest constraint for creativity is the infinite number of possibilities from having no constraints (the white space).

Rule #1: Set Rules
Every week, for the last twelve weeks, we had to produce a video – a self-imposed requirement. The most successful videos came from an assigned theme or a rule. Having a rule or parameter was the biggest jump-start to creating a video, but I didn’t understand why until we watched The Five Obstructions (2003).

The film depicts a director (Lars Von Trier) who makes his mentor (Joergen Leth) redo his movie — the Perfect Human (1967) — five times, following different constraints each time. In every instance, Leth outsmarts the limitations and produces an incredible film. It was amazing to watch the same film rendered in such different ways, and every time it was jaw dropping good. This was only possible because Leth had to follow the obstructions imposed on him by Von Trier.

Documentaries & Research

An interview with Scott Macklin, CTO of UW Dept of Ed discussing how documentaries can be used for formal research and how this applies to his latest film, Masizakhe.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by digitalecologist with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

gotime.com: social network + testoterone

Jeff Khadavi is the founder of the soon to be born GoTime.com, a site that leverages social network, data mining and venue info to do answer the quintessential question of what’s going on tonight.

He came to one of my class at UW and proudly announced his Columbia MBA drop-out status. He knew that he would immediately gain respect as an entrepreneur and innovator. “We just got together, my two friends from MIT and I and we came to Seattle to do follow execute our vision.” Yes, inspiring.

Missing the boat on digital learning

As a follow up to my last post, I got this article “Research funds for technophiles” by Mark Bauerlein. He criticizes the tech fanatism (the author takes some stabs at some of my favorite people like Jenkjins and boyd) which fails to address the central question of how digital media is changing learning.