Entries Tagged 'Education' ↓

Check out the best digital educational toy I think I’ve seen yet. This has so much potential it’s ridiculous.

I’d have loved it as a kid.

And of course, it’s open source and social. Do a search for Phun on YouTube to find hundreds of inventions.

Since August I’ve been working as part of the New Media team at Maverick TV developing an idea for a major new project for Channel 4 Education. We’ve been looking at how to develop a web-based approach to supporting entrepreneurship amongst 14-19 year olds.

We’ve now been given the go ahead to start work on the first phase of the project and I’m going to be taking the creative director role. I’m excited about this project as it has the potential to be something really groundbreaking. The project also incorporates social media, entrepreneurship, education and social enterprise, all of which are areas of huge interest for me.

It’s at such early stages at the moment that it doesn’t even have a name yet - however I’ll post more here as the project continues.

I’m not often really blown away by a new site but this one has really impressed me. Jumpcut is a system which allows users to create their own videos online quickly and easily.

To make a video you just need to:

• Upload titles and imagery.
  
• Upload your video clips (it doesn’t seem to complain much about formats which is nice).
  
• Upload background music.
  
• Whack it all together using a very simple interface.
  

I managed to put one together in five minutes flat - and the best thing is it’s already up on the web ready to add to your site. None of that waiting three hours for it to upload nonsense.

It’s beautifully made, ridiculously easy to use and is something I’ll definitely be using for projects in the future.

Sites like this are another step along the road to allowing anyone to create without needing a ton of equipment. Good one guys.

UPDATE: Also just found Eyespot which does a similar thing; will let you know how I get on with it.

technorati tags:JumpCut, OnlineVideo

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Samuel Jones and Peter Bradwell from Demos. I always enjoy talking to people who are as switched on as these guys are, especially when it comes to the web, social networking, online communities and so on.

I thought I’d mention that they’ve just released a new pamphlet: “As You Like It: Catching up in an age of global English”. It’s definitely worth a read (free PDF available).

From the blurb:

Around the world, the way that English is used has come to reflect the changing powers of globalisation; it is spoken in different ways, by different people, for different purposes. The UK has developed an unsustainable complacency to its native tongue. Opportunity and influence remain tied to English, but As You Like It argues that native speakers are at risk of being left behind.

There’s no question that having English as a first language makes life much easier in many ways - but could this be lulling us into a false sense of security? Especially when our young people are dropping out of language lessons in droves. Interesting stuff.

They also have a project idea called the Democtionary which will aim to track changes in the English language over time. They’re looking for people to help out so if you’re interested, get in touch.

I’ve just been having a play with Brightcove, a system which allows anyone to set up their own online TV channel. It’s quite like YouTube but much more geared to content producers who want to charge for what they want to do and make a business out of it. It has other advantages over YouTube. I put together my own channel to test it out, and here are my initial thoughts:

• Easy to sign up
• Easy to use
• Comes with its own offline software application (the PublishPod) which converts the video before you upload it, unlike the annoying YouTube process which forces you to do it yourself, degrading the quality.
• It’s possible to set charges for each individual video. This is the first time I’ve seen this available in the UK, although I may be wrong.
• The player skin looks better than the YouTube one

I’ll post more as I play with it. Here are the results - it took about 20 minutes in total from start to finish to set up the channel and upload this video.

Here’s an idea - why not give 10,000 young people £10 and see what they can build with it in one month?

www.makeyourmarkwithatenner.com

A fantastic idea - I’m really looking forward to seeing the results.

UPDATE: You can now keep track of the results at The Tenner Blog