Are you a digital native?

…or a digital comer-inner*? Here’s a link to Marc Prensky’s seminal 2001 article which outlines the difference; however recent work by The Open University suggests that the difference is not so straightforward and digital natives are made, not born.

*I’m a digital fence-sitter myself.

New Sigur Ros stuff

Sigur Ros make music that sounds like how the Icelandic landscape would sound if the Icelandic landscape was music (Sigur Ros are from Iceland). You have probably heard of some of their music if you’ve watched David Attenborough’s Life on Earth series – their song Hoppipolla was used as the theme music, and for a while was used on just about every other BBC ident at the time.
You can hear songs from their new multimedia extravaganza here.

Learning to love mobile learning

See A quick look at mobile learning from the University of Huddersfield’s Teaching and Learning Institute.

Xpert media search engine

An excellent tool which searches for media files and identifies the licence attribution as well – no more wading through Google looking for assets which are royalty and licence free!

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/

Cue the music

This is “Dictaphone’s Lament” by Tycho. Tycho is an alias of multimedia designer Scott Hansen, who is also known as artist ISO50. There is a dream-like quality to the video which perfectly matches the tone of the music.

There is some really sweet sculpture at University…

…here’s a photo of me next to a piece of sculpture by the new art and design building at University. It’s a beautiful piece composed of a series of geometric shapes with completely reflective surfaces. If you didn’t look, you might not notice it.

I like art which invites you to do more than nod pleasantly and walk on by.

The legs belong to my son, who took the photo, by the way.

Chronic introvert seeks publicist

Some facts about me:

• My job involves trying to encourage lecturers to use more technology in their teaching.
• My 3-year old saw a photo of me when I was younger and thought it was her mum (I had more hair).
• I like ampersands.
• I am studying for a master’s degree in multimedia and education to help with the first point.
• But not because I’m competing with my wife or anything, even though she has more master’s than me.
• I like the affordances of social networking software for teaching and learning.
• I would like all educational software to be as polished and easy to use as commercial software (see for instance, Pebblepad vs. Learning Objects’s Campus Pack
• I’m interested in the experience of e-learning from the student point of view.