Saturday, September 26, 2009

Personas and the multiliterate curriculum vitae



I just posted this to YouTube:

"In a multiliterate society as it is emerging in the 21st read-write century, it may be that curriculum vitae in formats such as this one will replace the paper-based versions prevalent in the 20th read-only century. The distinctions between centuries were made by Lawrence Lessig, and Personas is an M.I.T. project from http://personas.media.mit.edu/ designed to reveal anyone's webpresence."

(Incidentally, I'm fortunate to have a unique name; all the output shown in this screencast is about me, but it doesn't work like that for everyone ;-)

Another interesting site that will aggregate content on your name is http://addictomatic.com

To make the screencast, I used Camstudio to produce an almost 400 megabyte AVI file. I then used VideoSprintLight (reviewed here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/convert-video-files-to-dvd-mp4-vcd-mpeg-windows/) to create an MP4 version of only 77 megabytes.

It was crucial to do the conversion on my PC because I was having trouble (facing 4 hours upload time, not counting timeouts and retries) to upload the AVI directly to YouTube, and I figured I'd have the same problem sending it to Zamzar, or ConvertFiles, or Media Converter.

3 comments:

darren elliott said...

Hi Vance, thanks for popping over to my blog at tumblr. I doubt you remember but this was part of a Teacher Development project I set up in March and tried to recruit for via the webheads yahoo mailing list. You commented at the time that it wasn't really necessary, and it turns out that in some ways you were right - the last post in that blog (posted in September 2009)is titled "A glorious Failure". I`m writing it up now for a book chapter I'm doing, but I`m also blogging on my own now, on language teaching, technology etc... (www.livesofteachers.com).

As for this Personas thing, I've seen it before, and it's great. Unfortunately, I share my name with some kind of Hockey Player...and all the Japanese names I tried turned up nothing which limits what I can do in class. But I can imagine some interesting reading skills activities.

Nik Peachey said...

Hi Vance

I love the personas thing, but I only wish that once it had finished creating that wonderful bar code you could click it and check out the links and comments etc about each characteristic.

In the end I find addictomatic much less stylish but more useful and it has really helped me to find out what peple are saying about my content and build them into my network, so many thanks for that.

As for the technical problems, I think Camstudio has had its day, would be much better to use something like Jing, ScreenJelly or Screen Toaster which will create smaller files and host them for you.

Thanks again for the links

Best

Nik Peachey

Darren Elliott said...

Yes, I've heard very good things about Jing...