Late in my time zone, but still current in others!
I love the Christmas season. I’m a sucker for smarmy Christmas movies, decorated trees, houses lit to the nines, and a traditional Christmas Carol or two that can bring a tear to my eye. Handel‘s Hallelujah chorus can have that effect on me, and it’s performed to very good effect here in a very non-traditional food court. As with most flash mob efforts, what really captures my attention are the rapt expressions of the onlookers who delight in what is unfolding before them.
Another Flash Mob viewing this week was thanks to Modern Family. I am loving this series and it’s take on relationships within families. Take a look at their treatment of the phenomenom.
Hope it brought a smile your way and got your weekend off to a good start. Make the most of whatever delights the weekend brings. : )
* Thanks to Ann Oro for tweeting out a link to the Hallelujah Chorus flash mob.
Two weeks ago, my son came across this funny kid on YouTube lip syncing to some recent popular songs. I watched along with him, and my mind was occupied thinking about the background story of this boy. Why was he uploading so many videos? How had he gained such a mass audience, or as Chris Anderson would say, how had he attracted so much light? (The above video has been viewed over 17 million times!) Did his parents know what he was doing in his room? Does he read the comments left on YouTube and how does he deal with the ‘hate’ comments that appear on his videos? Do the positive, supportive comments inspire him to go on? How has his YouTube fame changed his life?
Some answers came to me today when I uncovered the video below. The boy’s name is Keenan Cahill, and recently he was asked to appear on a talk show in the United States hosted by someone with the name of Chelsea Lately. Her production team arranged for rap singer 50 cent to make a guest appearance in Keenan’s room and perform with him.
15-year-old YouTube star Keenan Cahill has a rare genetic disorder called Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome, also known as MPS-VI. Those with the disorder usually stop growing at about age 8 and are characterized by a shortened trunk and restricted movement.
This disorder, which affects one in 25,000 people, has no known cure.
In my quest to discover more about how Keenan came to be a YouTube star, I uncovered this interview with him recorded from a Chicago radio station interview in March 2009. In it, you discover that Keenan started uploading videos without his parents’ knowledge. It was when he started getting emails from afar that he let his parents know what he’d been doing.
Keenan represents the new breed of internet sensation. People who can attract the light to them and gain notoriety and ‘fame’ in the process. How long will it last and where will it take him? Who knows?
Me, I admire him. I admire him for having a go. I admire him for rising above the pretty ghastly comments you can find in the comment stream on YouTube that make me despair a little bit for the future of humanity. Make the most of your time in the sun Keenan and let it take you far. You’re certainly making a good go of it!
You, enjoy the weekend ahead. Make a good go of it. Think about how you’ll make your dent in the universe. : )
I enjoy Simon’s cat. Having two cats myself, I can identify with the behaviours on display in Simon’s animations. This one takes my fancy because Bella, one of my cats, will position herself under lamps when I’m correcting school work.
I’ve had another very busy week, and I’m just about to write about it too in another post. I’m looking forward to a sleep in tomorrow and some quality time with my daughter, who returned from two weeks in the UK this morning. When I got home she was already asleep, and we haven’t heard a peep from her for the last 6 hours or so. I’m guessing she’s not going to wake until mid morning, and hopefully will be back in a proper sleep cycle before the start of school next week!
Enjoy your weekend. I hope something special awaits you. : )
We’ve just got a Telstra TBox (to go with our 100G Bundle – I’m in internet download heaven!) and my son has been having a great time surfing YouTube and discovering cool videos. Well, videos he considers cool anyway. My Morning Run was one of them and it definitely fits the cool category. Watch these guys do Spiderman like moves without the aid of Hollywood special effects or velcro fingers! I’m in awe of them.
I’ve got a lot I want to write about this weekend if I can drag myself away from housework, or the lure of a sunny day. Stay tuned.
Both of this week’s videos were sourced by my Year 9 students today. Some were completing an assessment task, so I set the remaining few (we had a lot of students out today as our yearly camp program begins) to the task of honing their visual literacy skills to find a YouTube video clip that met the criteria of being both funny and clever. The first one is more clever than funny, but the second fulfills both criteria (IMO). I think Facebook vs Real life would be interesting as the basis for a class discussion, maybe even the prompt for a writing exercise or debate. They loved the task; they beavered away with their headphones on, erupting in laughter as they came across videos that appealed to their sense of humour.
Right now, I’m experiencing mixed emotions after I fare-welled my daughter, who left this evening on a two week UK trip with school. There were tears (from me!) as I kissed her goodbye, but smiles and laughter too as I waved at the bus leaving and contemplated the wonderful adventure she is about to embark on. Sure beats my school camp to Glenmaggie when I was a teenager!
Have a great weekend. I will, because it’s an extended one due to the Melbourne Cup holiday this coming Tuesday. You gotta love a horse race that stops a nation, and gives Victorians a public holiday!
I saw this a week ago, and have been meaning to post it ever since. Ken Robinson is a brilliant presenter. He doesn’t always use slides, it’s often just his spoken voice delivering a powerful message about the need to transform education . He does this well with his personable nature and a touch of humour along the way. RSA animate adapted this effort from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken. If I were a principal, I’d forget about talking and use this to begin my next staff meeting; more educators need to hear messages like this as part of their professional development. For those who struggle watching a person speak, this animation should hold their attention for the full 11 minutes!
I’ve had a flat chat week, and been sick to boot. (can you think of any more idioms I could pack in there!) I think the busy nature of the last couple of weeks caught up with me, and my voice gave out. I’ve been talking in very husky tones for the last few days and am looking forward to a quiet weekend of recuperation. Hopefully, I’ll be sounding more like myself by Monday.
Have a great weekend. Make the most of whatever comes your way. : )
Late, late, late. I was so tired after returning from New South Wales last night that I couldn’t get to School’s out Friday. This morning I remembered it was Blog Action Day, so I’m hoping this post makes it into the 15th of October in a timezone somewhere in the world!
The theme for this year is Water;
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.
I used this video a couple of years ago in a post, but it’s stuck in my memory as an excellent solution to the problems in developing countries. The aquaduct filtration vehicle was the winning entry in the Innovate or Die contest put on by Google and Specialized. The contest challenge was to build a pedal powered machine that has environmental impact.
I’ve never seen anything about Google Me here in Australia, but it appears to have been released in the United States last April. Jim Killeen Googled his name and discovered a number of people who shared his name in the search results. He then decided to make it his mission to make contact with the people who would agree to meet and be interviewed. I have to say it appeals to my inner geek. (and I can’t believe I’ve just written that, because I shy away from the geek description so commonly applied to anyone who uses a computer for any length of time. I think I have to come to terms with the fact that it probably does apply to me!) What I find interesting from this trailer is how Jim Killeen found that some of the other Jim Killeens didn’t want to be interviewed. There is no doubt privacy and anonymity is foremost in some people’s minds; those of us who find so many benefits that come from transparency and connectedness need to be mindful of the desires of others who prefer a lifestyle hidden from view.
We’ve been discussing Googling your name in my English class. There are some students with common names who can find nothing about themselves in search results because there are so many who share their name, and some of those people obviously have a much larger digital profile than they do. Some of them find this concerning; recruiters who may be Googling their names probably won’t find anything potentially damaging to their careers about them, but they probably won’t find any of the potentially great stuff that might be advantageous to their career either. I have to admit to feeling a little sorry for the other Jenny Luca’s out there in the world. It’s not a common name; I can only find two who seem to have some digital traces, but my footprint is making it hard for them to be heard.
Busy weekend of work ahead for me. I’m delivering a Keynote Address at the AIS ICT Integration Conference next week and need to refine my presentation. I’ve presented to audiences many times, but this is my first keynote. Jeff Utecht is delivering the keynote on the second day, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing him speak, and touching base with members of my Twitter network, quite a few whom I’ve never met. The conference sessions on day one all look very interesting and the second day promises to be invigorating as conference participants are encouraged to be active participants, and work in teams of like minded people to explore how ICT can be used to enrich the teaching and learning experience.
Enjoy your weekend. The sun will be shining in Melbourne, and that makes me happy. : )
I’m using this video today because I think it’s funny, and not because I want to become part of Valvoline’s viral marketing strategy to try to get me to click on their links and sign up to their promotional activities and potentially win me over as a customer. Interestingly enough, it’s worked for them, because here I am writing about it and linking to them. It’s not about that, instead it’s an exercise in the new information fluency understandings that we need to be teaching in our schools today.
In fact, who I’m really helping here is Simon Owens, a a 26-year-old social media consultant and online journalist from Washington DC, whose blog has the nifty (!) title, Bloggasm. He is commissioned by companies to push out their content and get bloggers like me to write about it. He succeeded today, in large part because I liked the video, but also because this is something that’s important to write about. Plenty of bloggers out there get seduced into promoting other people’s products for free, and I’m betting a fair few of them out there don’t even realise they’re doing it. Here’s what Simon does, from his about me/hire me page;
Why your company, political group or media organization should hire me
Let me give you an example of what I can do. Back in May a film company approached me because they were trying to push out a YouTube video that was highlighting what they perceived as unfair labor practices from a well known brand. I wrote up a short post about the campaign and then that night spent about two hours pushing it out to a number of bloggers and social media users that worked within niches that I thought would be receptive to the content. One of the talents I have is using analytic search tools to identify specific micro niches of influential bloggers that are most likely to write about the content I’m pushing.
By the time I woke up the next morning, the post in which I had written about the campaign was getting over 1,000 views an hour. It was linked to by some of the most popular sites on the web (at least one of which receives over a million visitors a day) and several large marketing blogs. Several dozen smaller blogs wrote about it and links to the content were tweeted by several hundred Twitter users. It also gained strong traction in Stumbleupon and the post received nearly 500 hits an hour just from that site alone.
When all was said and done, the story had been placed before thousands of people, many of whom took the time to take that content and push it out to even more people. And all this was done because of two hours of work — I knew the exact bloggers and online journalists to seed the story to, and once they had it it was just a matter of watching the flames spread.
Drop me a line if you’d like to talk strategy for your content or brand.
This is how the Web works now people. Be aware of it. Teach your students this. Make sure that we are producing a nation of aware users of Web content, people who drill that bit deeper, who comprehend why it is that they may be contacted in a friendly, personable email alerting them to something new they may be interested in.
To be honest with you, I admire Simon and the way he has created a career for himself online. Good for him. I wonder, did he learn any of these skills from the school or university he went to, or did he self direct his own learning and explore avenues because of opportunities he saw? My bet is on the latter. To his credit, Simon did mention in his email to me that he does some consulting for the makers of the video. Simon is someone who I’d like to invite to my classroom via Skype to talk to my students about persuasive techniques and the Web. Would fit very nicely into the work we’re doing in the coming weeks.
Use this post as a teaching tool with your students. It’s my gift to you this sunny Friday, last Friday of school holidays, last Friday of freedom from the full on responsibilities of working life!
What do you think? Is it amusing, distasteful, ridiculous? My 11 yr old thought it was pretty funny.
It’s made me think of something to do with my English class. Perhaps we could make visualisations of metaphors? Sounds challenging, but something of interest for us all.
I can’t tell you how different I feel now that I’ve been on holidays for a week. Relaxed, rested, and so enjoying a lack of any routine. I don’t think I’d have any trouble managing to fill my days if I wasn’t at work for most of them, I can tell you that!!
AFL Grand Final here in Melbourne tomorrow. That means BBQ for lunch, catching up with friends and family, and eyes glued to the screen for the afternoon. My money’s on St. Kilda. God help us all if the Magpies (Collingwood) win; their supporters will be basking in it for the next 12 months if they do!
Have a great weekend. Hope the sun is shining wherever you are. : )
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 