Category Archives: fun

Visual effects and meeting strangers with Alec Couros

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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

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

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

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”.

My latibule

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Very early this morning I completed my first adoption ever. I adopted the word “latibule” from the site Save the Words where infrequently used words are made more known through a fun Flash front-end throwing in the occassional “choose me audio piece. The web site is no latibule anymore as people start adopting words. I actually do not only have one latibule, but more depending on what I want to hide from. But I won’t tell where they are. ;-)

Thanks to cogdog for the site suggestion.

I really adopted a word.

I really adopted a word.

And now, what does it mean?

A nice site to explore

latibule = hiding place

Avatar by name

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Philipp Lenssen wrote an application for the 24-Hours Application Challenge at Friendfeed that converts a name into an avatar. Depending on how I spell my name and whether or not I include my middle initials, I come up with different avatars.

Avatars for my name created with the String to Avatar Converter

Avatars for my name created with the String to Avatar Converter

They look all very male-centric to me. Was it easier to create male faces? Is the converter geared towards the male internet community?

I guess I won’t use any in a real profile, especially the mean-loooking ones, unless I want to pose as somebody else and hide my true self. :-)