Day 8: Movie star

The Prize of Water, a mini-movie made by Emma, Clara and myself: Enjoy!

Day 6 & 7: Movin´

The last two days have been lively and full of activity. We have mainly been learning Photostory by using Photostory. Making a digital story from still pictures to film with sound, movement and music have been exiting. I have been working with Ana-Maria and Alice. We have gone through some fases, starting out with throwing ideas followed by sampling pictures for our story, then drawing a more specific storyline… and by doing that getting additional ideas… The editing – chosing the best pictures, putting them in sequence according to the story board and adding sounds and voices, were more of a systematic process, still creative: giving the different “characters” different voices and alternately acted by Alice, Ana-Maria and myself, got us in a great mood. Would you like to see the result of our mutual effort? WELCOME TO PAW-TY!

Day 5 Latina – a blog study

From morning to lunch time we mostly worked on  how to identify good blog portals. Bloglines was in focus as well as Technorati. Then, how do we subscribe to blogs we would like information from regularly? Using Bloglines as an exemple:  Out of curiosity I studied the list of their most popular blogs. Actually, I was looking for international news pages. Listed as no 11 I found BBC News UK. But instead of subscribing through Bloglines, I chose to link the BBC News frontpage directly to my blog. Establishing a link thus created a blogroll headline. I added no 6 USA Today too. Later on I will supplement my bloggroll with other favourites of mine. I would recommend others to do the same; if you are interested in a certain theme or if there is a certain topic you would like to  discuss, blogs seem to be an efficient an interesting information – and participation – channel.

Day 4 Latina – What to expect from a Wiki day?

Afternoon:  Group work using Wikipedia as source was quite interesting. Initially, Andrea´s task was to study the quality of Wikipedia whereas mine was to look into the Wikipedia community. Along the way we found out that the topics were interrelated and made a joint presentation using Google Docs. Two other groups had also Wiki-related topics to endeavour and present. Alltogether, todays processes and presentations gave insight and basic knowledge of Wikipedia as such.

Morning: To cheer up my new Latina friends ….

Hunting cat videos is great fun. However, I have done a bit of homework as well, studying the blogs of my course mates, getting impressed by their views and opinions about new and “old” medias. I have also started to develop an idea for a project. Believe it or not, it is job relevant and not about cats. But I admit that I was tempted for a moment…

Day 3 Latina – a Google day?

Good morning! Todays  first task is to do research on Google. What makes Google so special?

First, let´s google Google and have a look at the company history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google  and what Google say about themselves http://www.google.org/ . Secondly, let´s look at what Google has to offer: Videos, http://video.google.com/,   News, http://news.google.com,  Images http://images.google.com/,  etc. etc.  Wow, what do they not have. They have a large array of contents and of the type people are looking for all the time. Or maybe we should look at Google from another angle. Are Google so special because they have systemized information in a way that make them the first choice and first source to so many? In the sense that it is the technological qualities in the search engines that make them stand out? Of course it is.  Google would not rule worldwide if it had not been so. For the sake of it: I better do some research on their flaws – do they have any?

Day 2 Latina – Snapshots

Today we have been working with mashups:

• Google Talks and Google Docs (chatting, sharing doc´s, etc.)
• Picasa 3 (foto albums and videos; loading fotos and videos to blog)
• Calendar (own planning, charing calender)
• IGoogle – the most fun of it all!

All over a very useful and fun day, showing the possibilites of learning with playful tools.

Day 1 Latina – Join in!

Today the Latina Spring course started for the four of us – Emma, Lin, Yang, Alice and myself, Hilde.

We are looking forward to discover what this course can give us of knowledge. And maybe  our knowledge can contribute to the course as well?

Then, what´s the main aim of the course? Several things, of course.  Hopefully, it`ll make us marvellous bloggers.  The future will decide.