Tuesday, June 26, 2007

> Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Highlight Reel AllThingsDigital
"You and I have memories longer than the road ahead." I'm not gonna go into why I too wanted to cry at this.

The road ahead has much more potential than the past 25 years of Bill & Steve's cooperation/competition. We can transition from experiences for the tech elite to real, deep, learned experiences for the world's 7 million humans. But the road is not guaranteed.

I've decided to take a break from daily blogging. I need to build community here, and the blogging and other past attempts aren't doing it. Take a look at the previous post. Is the landscape that different from when we started? Not really. I'm gonna look at new ways to build community. I hope you'll join in.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Course to Midway - Battle of MIdway
This excellent site from the US Navy looks like it might have been up for awhile..but it's the first time I've seen it. We're especially interested in the battle map:

The best thing here: They Actually Use A Narrator. OK, so we're excited easily here. But think about it, how many of the educational Flash interactives that we've seen use voice? A handful at best. Even the videos popping up on YouTube tend to be way short on voice-overs.

For like a hundred thousand years, people have passed history to the next generation via vocal story. It might still work on the web.

As to interactivity, this one falls short. There isn't even a pause feature. And we always like to see a clock/timeline with the map. That's so much more informative to the general learner.

What do you think about the lead ins? I have a post coming on an inline video that takes 4 minutes to get to the storyteller...this one is lightning fast by comparison. Still, is it quick enough for the target audience here?

All of this reminds me that we're still finding dreadfully little critical review of these things. It must be out there somewhere; the word is certainly full of critics and educational laboratories. I just need to bust butt in the right places. I miss real print-bearing libraries.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

No Adobe Flash Support on the iPhone Mac Rumors
This seems a bit strange. After all, Steve announced monday (video ) that iPhone would support lots of independent apps - just without an SDK. 'It already has a well known SDK', says Steve: 'AJAX.' OK, I'm likin that. Still, we all expected Flash to be available on any moderately powerful platform. Many phones have had it for awhile, TIVO has it, PDA's, etc. On the other hand, the initial base iPhone has only 4GB of memory, so one can see where they might be tight on room for plugins.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Age of Exploration | History Now. Interactive History
Our good friends at Gilder-Lehrman (Hi, Janice!) have released another of their quarterly journals. I'm labeling this as an interactive, but in reality, the audience for this sort of thing is going to be pretty narrow. Not that you couldn't use it to build something that told a story for kids and the average learner. But, you know, who's the hero here? Where is the character development? Why should a learner want to invest energy and emotion?
National History Day Webcast
You can watch the event tomorrow, June 14th.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: Honor the Victims of Communism and Those Who Love Liberty
If you're in DC today, you can stop by the dedication of the monument to the millions of victims of totalitarian Communism. You might pause and think of Ronald Reagan, who twenty years ago today stood at the Berlin Wall and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Mr. Reagan's call was then received in the press and the academy about as enthusiatically as the surge is today.

There's an interactive of the gulag systems, but you'll need your Cyrillic decoder ring.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Web 2.0 and pedagogy overview, Wesleyan 2006 � SlideShare
Not sure there's much deep pedagogical insight to be taken from this survey-of-the-web circa Dec. 2006, but maybe you'll find something that tickles your thinking.

Friday, June 08, 2007

The Gunner's World
When I mentioned this blog in the last post, it was following up on a comment from Op-For, and I thought this was a blog well in progress. Wrong. CWO4 Sears is just beginning his duty as Marine Corps Historian in Fallujah and parts dangerous. I was first caught by his "real" job at the F/A-18 program office in Pax River (Pax River being a parallel life path I didn't take). Then I started following the writing in the blog. Very well written. Lt Col P at OP-FOR promises that Sears will be sharing his stories. As the only USMC Historian in Iraq, who knows where Sears will find the time, but we can all hope. Godspeed, Mike.
YouTube - Henry V- Speech
CWO4 Sears, a U.S.M.C. historian blogging at The Gunners World reminded us this week of the Bard's speech to soldiers going to battle. Of course, YouTube has a version or two. In this scene, the director must have had a brain fart in setting up the video imagery, but the audio delivery is tremendous.
MIT World | Distributed Intelligence
Browsing through iTunesU, we noted that MIT has a video portal now. Featured today are broadcasts summarized as MIT: Open for Education. Included are remarks from an iCampus conference, and discussions of experiences with open courseware and open standards.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

300
As too often happens, finally made it last eve to see 300 in its last week at the $1 theatre. Or part of it, anyway.

Did anyone over 15 like this?

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Roosevelt's D-Day Eve speech on the Fall of Rome Miller Center of Public Affairs
As promised, XM Radio has begun its re-creation of the day's broadcasts of the D-Day invasions. They've just finished up FDR's Fall of Rome Speech (Mp3) and will air the first D-Day bulletin at 12:43AM.

More Franklin D. Roosevelt Speeches (many with mp3) are available at the Miller Archives Multimedia Archive.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Sights & Sounds of Arlington Cemetery National Geographic Magazine
Three videos from NG start with the early history of Arlington. A potter's field for soldiers from Ohio? That's the story from the resident Historian.

Friday, June 01, 2007

National History Day
The National History Day national competition begins next weekend. Do you know anyone going? Is there a young person you can get started for next year? Local competitions begin in spring.