Congrats to Mashup Winners 2012!

We congratulate the winners of the 2012 Mashup Contest!

• First Prize: ZOMBIES – They eat your brain since 1932 by Christian Bona
• Second Prize and People’s Choice Award (determined by online voting): Deject/Reflect by Trevor Cassidy
• Third Prize: The advertising of Axe and Dove products by Tatiana Londono Gentile, Simon Pedisich, Hayley Sacks and Aislinn Wallace
• Special Mention for Theme of Games: Jenga: The Movie by Andrew Custage and Jayson Weingarten

View the winners online.

We thank our judging panel of faculty, staff, students and alumni, and the many faculty who encouraged their students to participate in our annual contest.

Join our winning team!

We are hiring for a WIC Desk Internship for currently enrolled graduate students – please help us spread the word! You can learn more about us on our staff page.

Tech Tools for Teaching – come play in June!

June can be a great time for faculty and graduate students to play with new technologies for teaching and learning – a time to stick your toes in the water without fear that the adventurous undergraduates might push you in to the deep end of the pool. I wanted to highlight some WICshops from our June calendar to consider:

• Video: Lindsey Martin will teach FlipCam Videos (June 5) -  take videos and post on YouTube in seconds. Cathy Turner from Center for Teaching and Learning and I will present Assigning Video Projects (June 11) on pedagogical considerations.
• iPads: Caitlin Shanley will present several iPad workshops. Did you know you can reserve library iPads for your classes?
• Social Media: Sam Barry will explore Storify (June 13) – a tool with great potential as for creating narratives from social expressions. Shannon Kelly from Career Services will present Linked In Hands-on (June 21) . Marie Jaquish will discuss Twitter (June 28).
• Web Design: We have workshops on Dreamweaver, CSS and WordPress.
• Presentations: Prezi is a new tool to consider to spice your talks up.

Have tech ideas for us? Write, call or stop by – summer is a great time for us to try out new topics. And save the date – August 22 – our next Gadget Day. You can register for our workshops online.

M’Aidez – A Stop-Motion short by Jesse Turnbull

A big congratulations to our own Jesse Turnbull, who recently finished this short stop-motion piece after months of work (and too many hours to count, he says).  It is best viewed in HD if your computer can handle it. Also, listen with headphones, as some of the sounds are rather subtle, but be careful, it starts very quietly and gets louder.:

Its apparent simplicity disguises the amount of time and effort that went into creating it. Fortunately, Jesse documented the process of creation in his blog.  Check it out to see photographs, sketches, reference photos, animated GIFs, and “making-of” videos he created along the way (check out the detail photos of the hands–created from scratch with credit cards cut into tiny pieces, glue, and bent wire, and totally posable).

And of course be sure to check out more of Jesse’s work (video, illustration, publication design, awesome hand-made robots, and more) at http://www.jesseturnbull.com/

Also, if you’re interested in creating your own Stop Motion, or simply want to know how it’s done, check out http://www.stopmotioncentral.com/ for tutorials, examples, links to free software, and more.

Exemplary Poster Design

Our poster printer has been humming along all year, and we have enjoyed helping students learn how to improve layout and design. This spring, we identified two exemplary posters from a large set shown at the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) Undergraduate Research Symposium. Rick Laurent Feely gives prominence to jarring images and uses a mellow color palette to convey mood in his poster “Madhouse Messiah” about the early years of poet Allen Ginsberg.

Ollin Venegas neatly organizes the elements in his presentation to fit the narrative of his research in “Notions of Health and Manhood in a Guatemalan Gym: Patterns Contra to Machismo.”

For more on designing research posters, consider attending our upcoming Photoshop for Research Posters workshop, which will be held on June 14th in the WIC Seminar Room.

Interview with Haftom Khasai

Haftom Khasai is a political science major and has been an avid user of the Vitale Digital Media Lab during his time here at Penn. I had the opportunity to interview him last semester about the documentary he helped create, “A Legacy of Courage: W.E.B. Du Bois and The Philadelphia Negro.”

Q: What do you do here at Penn?

Haftom Khasai: I’m currently a student. During the summers I work at the School of Design developing a high school curriculum.

Q: What kind of curriculum? Tell me about that.

HK: So, we’ve been working on this Du Bois project for, I would say quite some time now. I’ve been working on it for about four years, and it’s just been this huge collaborative effort between many different people. The project itself has many different components. One is an actual classroom curriculum where we have instructions for the teacher on how to teach this particular topic, which is Du Bois’s life and what he did here. Du Bois came in the 1890s to Penn to do this huge sociological study on what at the time people thought was, well, to put it the way they would, why African Americans have all these problems: why they can’t just succeed, why they’re not working hard enough. Du Bois actually came to Philadelphia thinking something similar to what the white folk were. But he came here and he did this seminal work, which ended up as “The Philadelphia Negro”. It was just this thick, thick book. It was a huge study, using advanced statistical and sociological tools of the time, and he is probably the first person to have done something like this. I think that is just an amazingly cool thing. And the thing is, people—especially young people–don’t really know what he did. And this whole curriculum–I think it’s a 1-week module–it’s supposed to explore what he did–this huge work, this huge accomplishment that he achieved. And the first component was this documentary that I’ve been working on here in the Digital Media Lab. The tools you guys have here have made it such an accessible thing for us, for the students here at Penn. And the second component is a Google Earth tour. The other components are being done by the other members of the team, and that includes board games and what not.

Is “prezify” a real word?

Earlier this month, Prezi (one of our favorite web-based presentation tools here at WIC) introduced an option to directly import PowerPoint slides into your prez-entation. But one of the best things about Prezi is that it allows you to think outside the linear structure of a PowerPoint slideshow, so I started to worry…wouldn’t this make a Prezi into just another PowerPoint presentation? Prezi’s answer to my conundrum: “prezification:”

Okay, so maybe that diagram isn’t the clearest, but thankfully Prezi also offers an instructional video on transforming an old school slideshow into a more visually interesting representation of your topic. Starting from around the 1:00 mark, this Prezi staffer gives some good tips on using the canvas to display relationships and create something your audience can understand from a distance.

So, whether you’re a Prezi fan (or whether you think it’s okay to keep making up new verbs by adding “ify” to everything…) or not, this new tool seems to me to be a call to action to presenters. And while I would never go so far as to say PowerPoint is evil, maybe it’s time we all start thinking outside the slide a little bit. Testify, er…prezify!

Creating Secure Passwords with Grady the Security Dog

The good folks at Penn’s Office of Information Security (a unit of ISC) have created this video on how to create strong passwords for your various online accounts.  The best part? Grady the Security Dog!  And it was created with equipment from our lending program here in the Vitale Digital Media Lab.

I’ve been told more videos are coming soon! Stay tuned!

Vote online for your favorite 2012 mashups

We have received 11 entries for the 2012 Mashup Contest – fifth in a series of annual contests. You can view the entries online and vote for your three favorite mashups through May 31. The winners selected by our judging panel and the popular choice award will be announced on our website on June 1.

Great resource: Learn.WordPress.com

While preparing for tomorrow’s WordPress Basics workshop, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time on the Learn.WordPress.com site. Using some handsome graphics and plenty of handy screenshots, this instructional site takes you from the very basics of setting up your WordPress account to a list of “10 Super Awesome Insider Tips.” While it won’t take you as deep into the tool as something like Lynda.com (check out their list of WordPress tutorials - not too shabby!), it’s a well-designed and simple resource to help you get started.