virtualDavis

I spent Sunday flying to San Francisco for this year’s DrupalCon. Attending this Drupal conference is a first for me. For the past few years. I’ve wanted to attend the conference but either personal or professional distractions came up that prevented me from attending the conference. This year is my year for DrupalCon and I’m anxious to get to know the Drupal community better than I have in the past.

While I do plan to do live blog updates during the Keynote addresses, I’m attending this conference less as a reporter and more as an attendee in a crowd of 3000 people. I spend way too much of my time through the year either leading IT discussions or managing the IT discussions that I rarely get a chance to just observe and listen. There are a lot of smart Drupal people and content management folks at this conference that I would be a fool to not take the opportunity and learn from the experts.

So this week you can expect a lot of Drupal talk. If you don’t want to hear about Drupal this week, I suggest you submit an article focused on your favorite CMS. I have a feeling I’m only going to be writing about Drupal this week…

 

via cmsreport.com

Hmmm… Where in this conference room is Bryan Ruby?!?! Sitting in front of me? Behind me?

Photo via flickr.com

My wife stumbled upon this gem while shopping in Keene Valley the other day. I’m a Yellowstone fan too, but I’ve got to admit this is a pretty clever t-shirt!

Photo via Photocapy on flickr.com

flânerie… it’s a walk in the park.

“…there’s just something amazing about being in the middle of a city, looking at the buildings and trees, the people who pass by, the smells of the food coming from corner cafes and restaurants. If you go slowly enough, you can really appreciate everything around you, and keep those memories for years to come…” (via the-flanerie.blogspot.com)

Jacques Réda at Place des Vosges in Paris (photo via Irish Times)

[Jacques] Réda has lived in Paris since 1953, and his chronicling of the city’s landscape is one of the recurring features of his work. The French term flâneur is often applied to him, though he prefers circulation . After all, “the real flâneur is someone who has their head in the clouds, who stops everywhere, who has no objective. That’s not really my temperament,” he says. And yet Réda seems forever on the move: setting off, stopping, beginning afresh. His gaze is constantly being drawn, whether by a beautiful 19th century building, an elegant shopfront, or, as in his prose-poem The Ruins of Paris , “by a sky as incomprehensible as the approach of love”. As Jennie Feldman, a translator of his poetry, has noted, the realistic tone of Réda’s work has been credited with helping to “ground” tendencies to lyrical flightiness, and in contrast to the abstract form of expression found in much modern French poetry, there is a sharp visual instinct at work. He has said that many of his poems originated in a single stubborn image of something seen or imagined: a woman selling wool, a reflection in a puddle, a beggar on a street corner.

Réda’s vantage point is often that of a face lost in the crowd, marvelling at the ordinary or the nondescript – bottles lying in the gullies, “singing colossi of roses” or “olive trees in grand conversation/calmly smoking in the sun” – as the world barges past.

“I was never as happy as I was when I wandered slowly on the backroads of the French countryside,” he remarks. And yet the urban street has so often been his muse. “A crowd is a collection of individuals, and each individual is an atom of that crowd,” he says. “I don’t enjoy crowds that come together out of necessity, like on public transport at rush hour . . . but I don’t dislike wandering around in a crowd that has merely this wandering around as its purpose, for example during the summer, on the banks of the Seine, or a Sunday on Grafton Street.”

Read the full article at Irish Times…

Related articles

• Mindfulness and Flânerie (virtualdavis.wordpress.com)

Warmer and balmier this morning. Though hazier than yesterday’s bluebird skies when I posted this clip on flickr.com with the following description:

Pretty crisp out this morning considering the beautiful weather we’ve been enjoying. There was still frost on the ground when I headed out to the dock house to watch the sun rising over Vermont’s Green Mountains. Wisps of clouds over Vermont, but crystal clear overhead. (This jerky video is proof that I am an amateur at shooting moving pictures. Of course, this was shot with the video feature on my still camera, so that accounts for some of the poor quality, doesn’t it?)

Today, I’m trying to wrap up at my desk early to get outside and work in the garden. A week and a half of rain expected to start tomorrow. If I could only get some spinach into the garden first…

Back in 1997 an in-depth feature on digital storytelling ran on SFGate.com (home of the San Francisco Chronicle), and it’s still referenced today because it offers such a comprehensive, almost encyclopedic introduction to digital storytelling. If the concept is new to you, this is a great place to start.

So what’s a digital storyteller? They are artists/writers using new tools and techniques, like HTML hyper-text linking for the web, animation programming in Macromedia DirectorPremiere, to tell their stories, and digital movie-making using Adobe.

These tools, and many others, are helping or perhaps even forcing writers and artists to think outside the realm of traditional linear narrative. Every aspect of storytelling; structure, plot, character, pace, voice, timing, and setting, has the potential to be morphed by digital contact.

Many of the new technologies, emergent themes and innovative projects are worth examining as a way to understand the current and constantly evolving state of digital storytelling.

Read the full article at sfgate.com

Although this already sounds a little dated (we’re already a full decade into the new millennium after all), it’s a basic, clear and helpful digital storytelling primer. You’ll find lots of great links to resources to accelerate your learning curve.

Perhaps the most important information comes in the first paragraph, a reminder that remains relevant today:

“If you don’t have a good story to tell you might as well save yourself the expensive digital bells and whistles and go back to your writing table. Content is still, thankfully, king.“

Over the last dozen years, the tools available to the digital storyteller have increased dramatically. It seems like every day there’s a new online resource to facilitate digital storytelling. It’s easy to get swept up in the razzle-dazzle, but strong narrative fundamentals are a prerequisite. A fancy mixer, oven and baking tin won’t create a delicious cake without the right ingredients. And a talented cook!

Fishing lures, seen in a window by South Kensington Station, April 3, 2010.
(I would be a very dead fish, because these little guys were so attractive.)

Apple’s Education Leadership Summit at the International School of Prague was true inspiration… Marco Torres‘s morning keynote fired-up real questions… Here are just a few notable nuggets:

• “Is our schooling getting in the way of the students education?”
• “Why do we ask: “What type of learner are you?” and not “what type of producer are you?”
• “Your “out” may be different from your “in.”
• “What other fields do we build for our schools beyond the football field?”
• “Are we paying attention to what learning looks like outside of school?”
• “What motivates students to post tutorials on Youtube for free, instead of doing homework?
• “Resources and network are the ingredients of learning.”
• “Distance is defined by bandwidth.”
• “Plagiarism is not always negative, “imitation is proven path to mastery.”
• “Don’t rush the solution, stay in the question. Do we want 50 learners plus a teacher or 51 learners?”
• “Technology is changing the way the learners learn… is it changing the way the teachers teach?”
• “Have you asked students and administration to define school in two words? – “it sucks or it’s cool” versus ”Forefront of education or Life time learners.”
• “International was an option, global is mandatory.”

Read Claude Lord’s full post at ClaudeLord.org

Claude Lord (@cloudlord), formerly a colleague when I taught at the American School of Paris, is an inspiring thinker, gifted pedagogue and oh-so-far-out-of-the-box visionary. Although her review of the Education Leadership Summit 2010 is teacher-oriented, this list of questions is relevant to everyone who has ever considered the ingredients of learning. What makes a teacher, curriculum or school effective? Why do children’s innate curiosity and hunger for learning so often get stifled by teachers, curricula and schools?

Frankly, I can’t help but note how accurately these questions could be applied to the publishing industry as well! Try going through the list and swapping out “learner” for “reader”, “school” for “book” or “print publishing”, etc. So much of the myopia and recalcitrance among publishers is rooted in the same biases and fears that hamstring teachers, curricula and schools. Coincidence?

run in the tunnel! by gingalegendweed, made at DoInk.com

“DoInk brings two things to the table: a community of talented people, and all the tools they need to share their ideas. Once, you’ve signed up you can begin animating, drawing, and sharing. And to speed things up, you can re-use the work of thousands of other users.” (DoInk.com)

DoInk is a website where you can roll your own animation. How does this work? No clue. Is it cool? Oh-so-very! And if you’re artistically challenged, that’s okay too… They’ve got you covered.

Writer Kris Spisak weighs in on vooks:

This concern, that digital storytelling in general and vooks in particular may compromise our ability or will to imagine, continues to pop up. I’ve explained that the sort of digital storytelling worth aspiring to should accomplish the opposite; it should fire the imagination and inspire readers/viewers to become active participants in, contributors to and sharers of the stories…

Read the full post at The Overflowing Bbookshelf.