This is a true curiosity which caused some good laughter today. A colleague showed me his check marks in Firefox today. They were upside down and have been so for a long time. He does not have a clue why they are not the usual way. It does not matter on which web site he wants to place check marks. Be it Moodle, be it Doodle (as in the screenshot), they are always upside down. Should we now call them “hut marks”?
Check marks from down under in Firefox?
Konami code in action on Facebook
The instructions are: “THE FACEBOOK TRICK: press up,up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Enter key, then right click then press up and down and magic circles will appear when you make a mouse click. the only way to get rid of them are to log off or refresh the page…IT WILL WORK! put this as your status if it works.”
It does work. I didn’t get it to work immediately because it gets a bit blurry after the right mouse click, but it works. I tried it in Firefox on a MBP.
One of my Facebook friends found the explanation in the Konami Code.
Now I know for sure that the apps that are suggested in the iTunes app store are country-specific or how else could I explain the #1 app being www.wort.lu? Too bad that I don’t see a general Top Ten list.
Country-specific recommendations for June 14, 2009
In late March / early April (is it really already so long ago?) a video started circulating that was filmed at the Antwerp Central Train Station. Unsuspecting travelers suddenly heard a song from the movie “The Sound of Music” coming from the loudspeakers. Not long after the first notes were heard, people started to dance. It first looked very random, but by and by, more dancers joined in and it became clear that a performance was under way.
It was a very creative performance with a modernized version of “Do-Re-Mi”. It could be called dance mob in reference to flash mobs for which a large number of people suddenly congregate in a public space, perform a pre-arranged action and disperse afterward very quickly. In Antwerp, 200 dancers came together to perform the song and went away. This dance mob was organized by vtm, a Belgian TV station and they filmed the preparations to the event as well in a Making of.
The video has been making the rounds on Twitter for the last month. A similar ad by T-Mobile, “The T-Mobile Dance”, has not been so successful. The people in Antwerp seemed to have been better prepared and documented their efforts as well as the action in itself very well.
The dance was filmed from several cameras that were placed in the grand train station that was very well suited for the performance. It is great to watch the video even after the 5th time and look at the surprised faces of the passers-by. I wish I had been there for the performance, but incidentally, I was in Antwerp almost 2 months prior to the event.
Alec Couros presented “Knock Down the Walls: Toward a Model of Open Teaching” at the MoodleMoot Canada 2009 today. Thanks to the organizers, his presentation was streamed live via Elluminate so that we, unfortunate to not have found our way to Edmonton, were still able to participate and see Alec in action.
As usual, his presentation was inspiring and filled with great examples of open education. However, Elluminate also provided a good deal of discussion in the backchannel for us who participated via it because it seemed that all of us had some issues with the application sharing. It slowed down Alec’s visuals considerably. On the upside, it thus provided for interesting effects:
Slow application sharing
Alec could not leave out Omegle, the “chat with a stranger” service that had made the news recently as I remarked a couple of days ago. He was brave to start a chat session at the conference live! And was lucky to have a good sport in his chat room. We will never know who that person was whose chat had been broadcast to all the presentation attendees in Edmonton and around the world.
Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching
You: how are you?
Stranger: fine
Stranger: how are you
You: where are you?
Stranger: belgium
You: how are things in belgium?
Stranger: As boring as usual
Stranger: where do you live
You: we are in edmonton, there are about 300 of us watching this… is that ok?
Stranger: sure
You: sorry, we better go.
You: thanks for the discussion
You: bye for now, take care.
But it did not stop there. Alec took brief glimpses at the change of mindset of teachers and students who participate in open teaching and learning scenarios as well as presented their advantages. When the discussion started and no presentation was needed anymore, all who were in Elluminate experienced a strange moment when we saw our Elluminate environment reflected back to us in Alec’s application sharing window.
Elluminated
It was a great way to ease out late Friday afternoon. Thanks again to everybody involved in making this stream possible.
Update: Alec shares relevant links in connection to his keynote in his blog post “Open/Networked Teaching Keynote at MoodleMoot”.