Croatian group’s internet research leaves them “Blue in the Face”
Need an illustration of the consequences of using inaccurate information from the internet? Look no further than Croatia. Apparently, almost 400 Croatians gathered to beat an American record for “most Smurfs gathered together at one time.” Unfortunately, the organizer, who checked for the previous record-holders with a web search, missed the fact that a group of students at Warwick University had already broken the American record–oh, and theirs, as well. “But, Jim,” you challenge, “I thought everything on the internet is true!?” Not so, my friends. Not so.
via NPR
Related posts
Looking at Poetry Through Wordle
I know, late to the party, but I wanted to do a little more than say “Hey, wordle is pretty cool and stuff. You should use it.” So here’s how I’d use Wordle to attack poetry. Take a few poems from the poets you cover, mash a few of the poems together, and create a wordle for each poet. Then have the students match them to the author. The Stevens one is pretty obvious with blackbird standing out that way but the other two will require a little more attention. The key is to make them identifiable but difficult. Too easy and it’s useless. If you presented these as problems to be solved at the beginning of the unit then you’d be able to get some interesting conversation goingEspecially if you were say looking at poets from the same genre as opposed to my odd personal selections.. I’d post them on the wall as big posters and maybe let people put their votes as to the author under each. Then they move their vote each day as students find out more about the poet and their works. So for Wallace Stevens I picked the poems available in Wikipedia – “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Thirteen Ways […]
Audio Annotation POC Using WaveSurfer.JS
See the Pen wave surfer – waveform by Tom (@twwoodward) on CodePen. I needed to make a quick proof of concept for the annotation of audio on the web. In this case, it’s meant to provide a visual and auditory way to play through interview segments that represent different categories of responses. I found WaveSurfer.js this morning and just a bit later I had a functional example. I find the ability to highlight track elements visually and access specific segments to be a pretty powerful combination. If we stacked several tracks vertically the visuals would quickly point out content variation in terms of timing and total composition. You could get more and more complex from there. Playing with it gave me all sorts of ideas (including possibly using it as part of of the upcoming Reclaim Your Dance Party // API + Audio = (beats, visuals, internet, participate) session at Domains 17 with Grant and Brian). It’s also looking like I’ll be able to work more with our music department to think through online course on music so possibilities like this will be very useful. This kind of thing would be pretty easy to turn into a plugin . . .
Like a Car Chase
This project was inspired by a Sklar brothers bit that I heard on the VA Beach AM comedy channel the other day. An edited and condensed version of track 16 is here. Now on to the assignment . . . Take any video.The worse the video, the easier this is. Look for something with virtually no action. If it’s exciting, you’ll never keep up. Add your voice over as if you were a local TV news anchor attempting to provide color commentary without stating anything as a fact or with certainty. Add all the hedge words and banalities that exemplify this kind of coverage. If you’re looking for the DS106 tag/aggregation for the assignment go here (AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments1085). The basic idea is this is almost the opposite of what we want students to do with writing. We want them to be specific, to eliminate hedge words, to make a strong argument, and to take a specific stance. In a class, I might flip it both ways. Have one understated version with no definite statements and then do another version which overstates things (like this Daily Show clip description which I may dig up the video for at some point). Or you could simply give them the option to either understate or overstate the commentary. This is a quick and dirty […]
Comments on this post
Can’t they just wash their faces and invert their hats and break the record for Gargamels?