Machinima in Education & other Findings

I love to prepare for presentations. Next week, I’ll be working with educators in Queensbury, NY, and folks coming in from surrounding districts. The topic will be digital learners, and what I like about preparing is finding new resources and examples out there.

Here’s one, from San Diego State University’s Educational Technology program. They have constructed a machinima that promotes the program, using SecondLife.

You can see it on YouTube at:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=fDYxV56G9zY

I also found and installed a new WordPress plugin, called Sphere Related Content. I’ve explored the Sphere service before, but today I installed the widget on my blog. I places a link at the end of each blog entry that says, “Related Content.”

When you click it, an Ajax popout window appears that lists recent blog entries and other media articles that are related to my post . It detects the relationships based on keyword matches. In the plugin configuration, I can orient the relations to new videos, politics with a Democratic or Republican tilt, or from a balanced point of view.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep the plugin installed, but it’s another example of how information, today, can be trained to behave in a variety of ways, reorganizing itself based on our needs, desires, and the messages we wish to convey.

It’s wizardry, and one more reason why we have to beef up what our notions of basic information skills.

Update: Interestingly — no matches for this article 😉