What part of the title did you not understand? Sushi on a conveyor belt at Kaiten East Sushi, 3rd Ave and 27th St., NYC. Got about a minute before my phone fell. The sushi goes around on a conveyor belt on different colored plates. Each color plate costs a certain amount (white, $1.50; pink, $1.75; green, $2.00, &c., &c.) Take what you want and stack the plates. At the end of the meal, the waitstaff tallies the different colored plates and calculates the bill. In Japan, this is called kuru kuru sushi. Pretty cool. And delicious.

Above is my first take on Alan Levine’s great “Make The Untranslatable Understood” DS106 assignment:

Use the Random Words with No English Translation tool (http://lab.cogdogblog.com/nowords/) to generate a word that could be better understood with a photo or image. Find a creative commons image or make your own, and include the word somehow in the image (using a desktop photo editor or web tool like Aviary or PicNIk). Then share it with someone and ask if it makes sense.

Indonesian in origin, “jayus” has made its way into  Malaysian, Filipino, Tagalog and now English.

(Image credit: TimmyGUNZ. I originally wanted to use an image of the real Fozzie Bear but could not find a suitable CC licensed one.)

VideoGlide puts out images at 640×480. Click on the images below to see the full size version.

My wedding band at 100x magnification.

Ink on a Post-It note at 100x magnification.

Same at 400x

Printed photograph at 400x magnification

Denim at 400x

Denim at 100x

Hairs at 100x

Face from a 1950s photograph at 100x

Mouth of a Russian matryoshka doll at 400x

Detail from same at 100x

Ditto at 100x

Printing on a plastic pen at 100x

Here’s the original vid:

And some great photos from that night by my CUNY colleague, Michael Branson Smith.

Here’s Luke Waltzer’s brilliant reflection on the DIY Radio session at Baruch the night before that provided the occasion to get together and play music loud. Really loud.

Oh and, this just in: audio archives and reflections by Giulia Forsythe. Rock!

So here is one from circa Dec. 2004 when Jonah was just a few months old and when our uncle Ivan gave us a behind the scenes tour of the New York Aquarium at Coney Island, Brooklyn where he volunteers to this day. My father-in-law, Jeremiah, who was visiting us at the time, makes an appearance as well. It’s one of the few times I got Jerry on video before he passed away about a year after this was shot.

Last week I finally rescued this short film from outdated format oblivion thanks to my friend Alan Levine who helped me salvage the editing I did years ago and inspired me to stop obsessing over minutiae that no one but me would care about and finally finish the video. Back in 2004, Antonella, a friend and fellow former Brooklynite, encouraged me to publish this video and waited and waited but I didn’t feel that it was ready and we both eventually forgot about it. Now here it is, Anto. Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This was a long time coming. Finally, here is a recording of a DS106 Radio broadcast from May (while I was visiting my parents in Southern California) which is now the stuff of legend. This was pure, unadulterated international free-form radio mayhem featuring me, my wife Jennie, my inimitable mother, Zack aka Noiseprofessor in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Olga Belikov and her mother in Vancouver, and Nigel Robertson in Hamilton, New Zealand. The conversation ranged from political scandal to spelunking to dirty words to sexy accents and all manner of unexpected madness, especially as the evening wore on. Zack called this convergence of disparate radio variables “DS106Radio Madlibs” and discusses the whole thing here. Olga describes this broadcast as “the best Internet experience ever”. It was a blast. Enjoy.

PST Radio Mayhem, Part 1
in which my mother, Jennie, and the Twitterverse discuss political scandal and other grave matters.

PST Radio Mayhem, Part 2
in which international, multi-lingual mayhem ensues.

[Image credit: Michael Branson Smith]

[A special thank you to both Giulia and JohnnyonthespotTim Owens, who graciously recorded the broadcast. Image credit: the great Noise Professor]

A new semester of DS106 means another crack at the animated GIF. This is the infamous eye cutting sequence from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic, Un Chien Andalou (1929). I’ll move that this short sequence remains among the most shocking and disturbing images in cinema. But now you can watch it again and again to the point that it loses its power to unnerve and is just a razor across an eye. Take that, cinephiles! Here’s the whole 16 minute film:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On June 9, 2011, students in the music program at Gleneagle Secondary School, a high school in Vancouver suburb Coquitam, BC, played its spring concert to a packed house in a 450 seat auditorium. A first in Gleneagle history, the performance was broadcast live over Internet radio to listeners all over the world. And while  that might sound like a huge undertaking requiring serious AV and IT infrastructure, it was not. Not at all. In a brilliant feat of do-it-yourself EdTech (or what some folks might have once called edupunk), the concert was streamed live by Bryan Jackson, a Music and English teacher in the school’s TALONS program, and graduating senior Olga Belikov, with a Macbook, some free software and a USB microphone. That’s it. That’s all it took to broadcast the spring concert to anyone anywhere who wanted to hear it. And it sounded great.

Gleneagle’s Principal was aware of what was going on but wasn’t entirely clear on the details. During one point in the concert, he  walked backstage where Bryan explained all the moving parts: the unremarkable laptop and microphone, the free software, the web radio station (DS106Radio — read about it in my last post and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), how he and Olga used Twitter to build a live audience of listeners from from all over the US and Canada, and  that the broadcast was being recorded and would be posted for posterity to Soundcloud, a free audio sharing site, so that anyone in the Gleneagle community or anyone else anywhere could listen to and respond to any part of the performance. Bryan also explained how he had been using various other social media tools at Gleneagle including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and web radio to enhance lessons, to share performances, and to communicate with students and colleagues. His Principal was duly impressed. The administration had been aware of and supported Bryan’s and other teachers’ use of social media but had never up to this point fully engaged their potential to increase engagement, promote programs, and share and interact with parents, teachers, students, and district administrators or anyone else. While they had an inkling of what teachers were doing with free web tools, this broadcast, its recording, and the new interest at the school in webcasting were, according to Bryan, probably the first tangible outcomes of Gleneagle teachers’ experiments with creating and sharing on the web. Here is a one minute audio clip of Bryan describing the Principal’s visit backstage:

Bryan Jackson on Broadcasting the Spring Concert

I love the irony here: Bryan tells us that he was able to experiment with various social media and web publishing tools and explore how their use might benefit his program and school only because one of the school’s IT people gave him his computer’s administrative password, which he really wasn’t supposed to have. It’s fairly common practice for IT departments in companies and educational institutions to withhold admin access to computers from end users for fear that they will go messing where they shouldn’t and damage the computer, contract a virus, install unauthorized software, or do things on their machines of which the IT department or the institution does not approve. This also ensures that end users have to rely upon IT personnel to perform simple maintenance tasks, modify configurations, and to update or install software. This is the traditional model where IT is in control of who has access and who does not while the end users are disempowered and must rely upon IT to make any changes to their machines. Here’s a wonderful example of a teacher who was trusted with full access to his computer and was able to use it to break new ground without hinderances imposed from above. When creative teachers have the latitude to experiment with the technology that’s readily available to them, wonderful things can happen. If there was ever an argument in favor of rethinking the model of how and to whom administrative access is granted at educational institutions, this is it.

I don’t know much about the general feeling toward the use of social media at Gleneagle or toward the privacy and security implications of web publishing and social media in instruction and for promotional purposes so I can’t speak to that. But it seems to me that, generally, there’s still quite a bit of trepidation about such things among educators. That trepidation, I’ll argue, tends to grow out of 20th Century notions of public exposure and our relationship with mass media and their roles in our lives. Privacy and security are certainly real concerns (FERPA exists for a reason), but it does appear that the discourse around them is often animated by outdated ideas about the production and consumption of media. It used to be that if you appeared on TV or radio, or in print, you had done or were involved in something a small group of editors and producers felt it was their imperative to broadcast. It had to be fairly remarkable, for good or for ill, to make the papers. Having your image or story broadcast to the world via a mass medium like radio or television, was special — something fairly unusual in the “look, Mom, I’m on TV!” sort of a way, unless you were among the relatively few who made a living in front of a camera or microphone.

Now, when anyone can shoot a video on a mobile phone and upload it immediately to YouTube, where it can potentially be seen by thousands, if not millions of people within just a few days, there’s a real banality to this sort of exposure. Most of our students share their lives on the internet in some way  every day. More and more of them live their lives in both physical and virtual space — this is something that those of us in their 30s and 40s who teach and administer programs are just now getting our heads around. Whats more, the means of media production, it has been said again and again by new media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and a host of others, are now in the hands of everyday people, no longer just media professionals. With relatively little effort and technical expertise, anyone can publish to the web. Anyone can broadcast audio or video to the internet on a mobile phone and an application that costs almost nothing. Heck, a bunch of us edtechhers built an open community radio station out of nothing more than a $25/mo server and a desire to play radio DJ.

Bryan Jackson and his colleagues at Gleneagle understand this well and are making amazing use of it. Thanks to a leadership that seems to appreciate the possibility the new media order offers educators, they have been empowered to use a combination of social media to do on their own what once was the province of AV professionals and marketing departments and required substantial infrastructure. While we’re by now used to seeing inklings of this sort of thing on the post-secondary level, it is encouraging and inspiring to see it happen in K-12. Bravo, Gleneagle Music! Bravo!

[This post is cross posted at my professional blog, cac.ophony.org]

There are many inspiring and fascinating aspects of DS106 that I’ll likely get into in future posts, but my favorite at the moment is DS106 radio (listen here), a communal web radio station that was the brainchild of Jim and Grant Potter, who graciously takes care of the hosting and provides sagacious guidance to those of us who wish to rule the airwaves. DS106 students use the radio station to showcase their audio assignments but anyone interested is welcome to upload audio files that will stream on ds106radio. An ever-growing number of us have also been experimenting with live broadcasts, which are easy to do from a computer or a mobile device and, I must say, are a complete and total blast to do. Live programming on DS106 radio ranges from brief field reports (including, most notably, Scott Lo’s compelling status reports after the massive earthquake in Japan) to multi-participant networked guitar jam sessions to conference presentations to themed sets of songs interspersed with commentary to free-form radio mayhem. I can’t articulate right now why going live on the radio is so much fun, but it is and I am completely hooked. And so are my parents, and I am getting to that part.

While visiting my parents in Southern California this week, I decided to try a live broadcast with them after dinner. I’ve been meaning to start compiling an informal oral history  of my family’s experience of immigrating to the US from the former USSR for some time and this seemed a perfect occasion to start and a perfect medium to start in. Most of what I’ve done on DS106Radio has, one way or another been an occasion to go back to roots and an oral history seemed the next logical step. Following Alan’s amazing example, my parents and I went on the air live to talk about moving to Ventura, CA from Soviet Riga, Latvia in October of 1979. We ended up doing about 40 minutes of a trip back to the year of our arriving in the US replete with appropriate music and a lot of laughing. The sound quality is somewhat janky (I’m trying to figure out why — gets better in the second segment) but all in all it sounds pretty good. Take a listen. I’ll likely post more of these when I go back to CA in May. My mother and father, who have now caught the live radio bug, are eagerly looking forward to getting back on the air. Can’t blame them. Enjoy.

Live Broadcast 3-12-2011 with Mama and Papa

Frozen lake near Riga, Latvia, c. 1977

Shortly after immigrating to the U.S. in October, 1979.