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21st February 2007

Power of digital text

posted in blogs, web 2.0 |

Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University has posted a great five minute video exploring the power of digital and hyperlinked text to connect ideas and people to YouTube:

Use the free YouTube downloader if you want want an offline copy saved to your hard drive that you can share with others when you are not connected to the Internet or don’t want to wait for YouTube to buffer the video. The free SWF & FLV Player works well on the Mac side to play downloaded flv files from YouTube.

The themes of this video resonate with my post “Shining lights, finding nuggets, adding tools” from December, when I wrote:

I think more teachers in our schools need to be specifically teaching students how to write effectively with hyperlinks, because hyperlinked writing is the most powerful form of writing that has ever existed. The ability to connect your ideas with words, thoughts, images, sounds or videos created by others is unbelievably powerful. This is the real power of blogging, in my opinion. I always try to link ideas in my blog posts to other sources or to related posts I’ve written or others have authored, because my goal in writing goes far beyond merely transmitting my own words and ideas: I want to connect others to ideas and in doing so, empower their own personal learning journeys. Since digital technologies have advanced so quickly and come so far in our own lifetimes, we are naturally more awed by the technology than we should be or than later generations will be. David’s exhortation is excellent, challenging us to avoid the temptation to be entranced by technological bells and whistles, and instead focus on CONTENT, IDEAS, and OPENING DOORS.

Via Tom March on the ITM.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under blogs, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. 1 On February 21st, 2007, Swimming In The River » I’m a Skype-er! said:

    [...] I have also been working on a powerpoint presentation that I will be giving tomorrow in my graduate class (which is a weekly videoconferencing-based class with 3 other sites.  Our professor is in Arizona, and two other sites from Missouri join us - way cool!) on a chapter in the book, Cultures of Curriculum (my assigned chapter was “Confronting the Dominant Order” - more to come on a future post).  I really wanted to embed a video from YouTube to better illustrate the social experiment carried out by third grade teacher June Elliott back in 1971.  Not being able to figure out how to do that in PowerPoint, I just put a link on the appropriate slide.  But in doing so, I worried that I needed a back up just in case the Internet was down, or the connection not working during class tomorrow night.  Thank goodness for Wesley Fryer’s Post “Power Of Digital Text” which alerted me to the idea of saving YouTube videos using the free YouTube Downloader.  I also needed to download a free FLV player because that is the file extension with which the videos are saved.  Now, as a back up plan, I have the video saved on my hard drive!     Now I can go to bed!  AHHHH! [...]

  2. 2 On February 22nd, 2007, Charlene said:

    Hi Wes, thanks for the link on the downloader… I have also used Video Downloader 2.0 which, provides a plugin for Firefox. When you arrive at a video you’d like to capture, there is a small icon at the bottom right corner of the browser window… click and the download begins.

    http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

    Enjoy!
    Charlene