An inability to sleep caused by an uncomfortable bed and the movie "The Green Hornet" have inspired the following:
3-D i'm sure we've all seen some example of it by now, whether in the movie theatre or a 3-D television, what do you think? Is it the next great innovation in entertainment? Or is it a gimmick that really contributes nothing to the experience when it is used? Most of you will likely lie somewhere in the middle of those two perspectives.
As you may have guessed i recently watched "The Green Hornet" in theatres where it was only available in 3-D. In this instance, as in "Toy Story 3" and "Clash of the Titans" I do not believe that the 3-D contributed enough for me to pay an extra five dollars per ticket. When I watch "3-d" content i lift my glasses at different times just to see how 3-D it is, if it is the picture will appear blurry without the glasses. In all of the examples i've listed there were multiple times where the 3-D blur did not appear at all, which would mean those scenes are not even 3-D. This, to me, was not only a rip off but only shows a further lack of ambition to take advantage of the technology. To me to be worth it the technology either has to deeply immerse the viewer in the content it is presenting (such as that in Avatar, which i though was an appropriate use of the technology).
Until the technology this is the most that can be done with 3-D.
What I am excited to see is the integration of this, and possibly the next step, into the classroom. I believe the next step of technology to be a projected image, a hologram, that someone will be able to interact with, perhaps not physically but via a camera sensor, something like that in the Kinnect sensor for the Xbox 360. When a student can sit in the middle of a battlefield, or watch an earthquake's effect on a town in person and have influence on it it would oppen up so many possibilities for education. Teaching history classes I feel that students often have trouble putting themselves into situations. With an interactive projection technology this would finally be possible. Thinking of the possiblities this presents in the classrooms, students making decisions in the history class to see how things could have turned out and being able to put themselves "on the spot" as it were. The better we immerse students in the content the higher their interest level and the better they will learn
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Social Media?
When John Finch brought up how we were using social media to examine social media i began thinking, where do we draw the line today?
This question brings up another question, how do we define social media? Maybe you just googled it, what was the first site that came up? Wikipedia? Yahoo Answers? Urban Dictionary? Guess what, those are all social media sites, sites in which anyone can create and account by just submitting an email address and begin adding comments or editing articles or definitions. Is defining social media by using social media valid? Personally, just because of the ever chaning nature of social media i think that defining it in almost any way is not just valid in the method in which it is defined but it would be hard to discount the definition itself unless it was extremely off topic.
Ok, for the sake of argument let's say that we've defined social media, i'm not taking a stab at it here, let's just say that we have. Now identify examples of social media. Facebook, twitter, youtube, now we've taken care of the obvious ones, but what else? I'm not a regular Much Music viewer but I have noticed a show on their network in which viewers can not only send in messages that are displayed on screen but can actually vote on and decide the programming of the music videos that are shown. With whatever definition of social media that you came up with; does that match? There is also a growing pattern amoung television networks of having votes on their websites in order to decide their programming, there are forums on their websites on which discussion can get quite heated about which episodes should be shown. People are coming together, debating, and eventually deciding the programming for a major network. Is that social media or is the concept of social media restricted to the discussion on the forums? If so then should the results of the social media, what you may or may not have just limitted to the discussion on the forums, not be counted as social media as they came about as a direct result of the social media?
So many more examples of this exist i'll let you look for more of them yourself, they're easier to find than you might think. But when you are looking for them, or even if you're out enjoying a movie The Social Network perhaps, try and draw a line between social media and the rest of the world, where is it? Is it even there? Or is it an ever shrinking smudge that gets just a little bit smaller everytime someone clicks "tweet"?
This question brings up another question, how do we define social media? Maybe you just googled it, what was the first site that came up? Wikipedia? Yahoo Answers? Urban Dictionary? Guess what, those are all social media sites, sites in which anyone can create and account by just submitting an email address and begin adding comments or editing articles or definitions. Is defining social media by using social media valid? Personally, just because of the ever chaning nature of social media i think that defining it in almost any way is not just valid in the method in which it is defined but it would be hard to discount the definition itself unless it was extremely off topic.
Ok, for the sake of argument let's say that we've defined social media, i'm not taking a stab at it here, let's just say that we have. Now identify examples of social media. Facebook, twitter, youtube, now we've taken care of the obvious ones, but what else? I'm not a regular Much Music viewer but I have noticed a show on their network in which viewers can not only send in messages that are displayed on screen but can actually vote on and decide the programming of the music videos that are shown. With whatever definition of social media that you came up with; does that match? There is also a growing pattern amoung television networks of having votes on their websites in order to decide their programming, there are forums on their websites on which discussion can get quite heated about which episodes should be shown. People are coming together, debating, and eventually deciding the programming for a major network. Is that social media or is the concept of social media restricted to the discussion on the forums? If so then should the results of the social media, what you may or may not have just limitted to the discussion on the forums, not be counted as social media as they came about as a direct result of the social media?
So many more examples of this exist i'll let you look for more of them yourself, they're easier to find than you might think. But when you are looking for them, or even if you're out enjoying a movie The Social Network perhaps, try and draw a line between social media and the rest of the world, where is it? Is it even there? Or is it an ever shrinking smudge that gets just a little bit smaller everytime someone clicks "tweet"?
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