At some stage I intend to post my thoughts on Edupunk, but for now I wanted to point to cool new Web 2.0 tool I’ve discovered called Glogster by embedding this Glogster done by ccosmato/chaz maloney featuring some of his “poster-children” (yuk yuk) for Edupunk.
Ok… well I did want to embed the Glogster, but of course WordPress.com won’t allow embedding, so you will have to settle for a lame screenshot instead and click through to the actual Glogster to see it in all its multimedia goodness (which sort of defeats the point!).
Glogster lets you create multimedia posters with embedded text, graphics, photos, videos and music. It’s sort of a multimedia scrapbooking application.
My only gripe is that I’d like to see the ability to hyperlink. It’s odd to be able to roll over an item and have them react but not be able to click on them… that’s what I’ve come to expect on the web.
Glogster has all the usual social software feature such as profiles, friends, tagging, commenting etc.
What I love about Glogster is the Post Modern bricolage-y way elements are combined into a non-linear presentation, allowing for the viewer to bring their own meaning and interpretation to the collection of sources and the relationship between them.
Oh well… the Glogster would have looked good embedded in the post. Hmm… time to organise that self-hosted blog, I think.
Perhaps someone would like to embed this glogster (or any glogster of your choice) in their blog so I can actually see what it’s supposed to look like!
Coincidentally, in today’s OLDaily Stephen Downes points to a summary he took of a talk given by Jason Ohler – Beyond Essays: Web 2.1 and the World of the Multimedia Collage – at the Desire2Learn Fusion 2008 conference.
I checked out Ohler’s website and came across this:
Beyond Words – New media literacy, fluency and assessment in education
Literacy means being able to consume and produce the media forms of the day. The default media form has shifted from the essay to the multimedia collage.
Appropriate, no?
This looks like a great resource on using digital media literacies and storytelling in learning. I’ll have to read it when I get a chance! I think there might be something in this storytelling business for me.
Update – 25/07/08: Hyperlinks on the original Glogster are working now when you roll over areas that have the pink marker circle pop-up, which is exactly what I was expecting. They didn’t work for me before, so maybe ccosmato/chaz/Charley just hadn’t added or activated them. Interestingly, the title and Angrybeth’s avatar pic jumps out of the page when rolled over at the embedded version on OLDaily, but not on the original Glogster site. Weird, although all of this weirdness may be due to the behaviour of Flash on Ubuntu.
Update – 27/07/08: In response to Alicen’s comment I posted the Glogster over at my Blogger test blog (why didn’t I think of that before?!) – Glogster – faces of Edupunk.
Sean's Emerging... 
Hi Sean,
I did the glogster ‘faces of edupunk’ for similar reasons as your blog post; –Hoping to point out some of the nifty features of the tool to the edutech crowd. I suppose one feature that I couldn’t well describe on the poster itself and that you well illustrate by commenting on my piece is that the author can receive feedback from the audience and can easily edit the piece if they are swayed by the audience to do so. I had an un-easy feeling when I used the term ‘poster-children’ but couldn’t seem to get past it and let it go to just get the project done. Hearing one “yuk yuk” from the crowd swayed me to go back and tweak the words a bit. Thanks! Anyway, I used the glogster facebook embed to put the poster in my facebook account with okay effect. It does shrink the presentation if you display the app to a small sidebar, but the embedded version behaves just as the stand-alone (vids, links and all). I like the app because the focus in on creation and it affords a very simple form of media mashup using the familiar metaphor of “poster” –probably why I got stuck on the notion of poster-child! Uggh! Cheers!
-Charley
@ccosmato: Noooo! I loved the “poster children” reference on a poster – I thought it was really “puny”! 🙂
By “Yuk yuk” I didn’t mean yucky, if that’s what you thought… it was a chuckle at the corniness of it.
I think you should go with your first creative impulse and not be swayed by what others think. Perhaps trusting one’s creative impulse and intuition is part of what Edupunk is about. I strongly encourage you to put it back the way your muse wanted it.
The edupunk gloster has hyperlinks- anything you rollover that animates with the pink circle links- I clicked in Tony Hirst and ended up at his site, Angry Beth’s name jumps to her excellent site…
I saw this a few weeks ago and put it on the “to do” list of my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story- it has some similarity to Vuvox Collage sans the scrolling.
The lack of embedding on WordPress.com is so tiring- heck even Blogger does that. It will embed a Google Map iframe, why not others? More than 2/3 of my 50 Ways Tools offer embed code— step up to the plate and embed, WordPuss.com!
@alan: Thanks Alan on the hyperlinks… I just discovered they worked as your comment came through. I’m pretty sure they weren’t working before.
Not being able to embedd javascript, iframes and Flash in the posts or templates (except for a few “approved” services) makes it very hard to create a Web 2.0 mashup PLE. Everyone over at http://edublogs.org/ would be facing a similar problem.
I understand it’s because of security issues, as both sites are built on WordPress Multiuser.
WordPress.com is a free service, for which I am grateful, and guess some limitations are going to be the “price” we have to pay, but it is still frustrating, nonetheless.
Sean,
I’m traveling in real life this weekend, so I think the edits will stand for now. But I now have a feature wish for the Glogster collage program… -Reversion!!! 🙂
Thanks for reminding my that “yuk yuk” can be a chuckle. I can now recall rolling with laughter as a child when Disney’s ‘Goofey’ would do his trailing laugh, “yuk yuk yuk yuk…”
Part of me still likes the “poster-child” allusion because it was such a common phrase during the punk rock era. The flip-side is that “poster-children” are often depictions of the lost or missing. I actually believe that anyone who is punk enough to forward radical improvements to the conditions of learning is probably more found than lost. Maybe I’m just a little too weak-kneed about ruffling feathers; –I don’t really expect that anyone will make a fan poster of me depicted as an edupunk!
🙂
Anyway, don’t starve my aggregator ‘cuz I enjoy reading your thoughts.
Cheers,
Charley
@ccosmato: I think the “poster child” allusion is a great one for the reasons you suggest, not just because it’s puny – that’s an added bonus.
“I don’t really expect that anyone will make a fan poster of me depicted as an edupunk!” I think they did… it was you! 🙂 You don’t have to appear in the poster to be in it. You’ve put yourself into your poster by being thoughtful about your creative decisions.
Again I strongly suggest – stick to your guns, honour your muse and go with your initial impulse.
I tried both sending it over to Blogger and embedding the Glogster code also, but neither worked there.
@Alicen: I managed to get it working over at my Blogger test blog (why didn’t I think of that before?!) – Glogster – faces of Edupunk.
I took the embed code for Blogger provided by Glogster and pasted it into the HTML tab of Blogger’s editor. I got an error message – that’s typical when you try and embed code that Blogger doesn’t like. I clicked on the check box that side “Hide Errors” and it still posted fine.