The Last Ride: A Cabdriver & An Old Lady

via Facebook, not sure if it is true, but it worth thinking about all the same.

Make Good Art

Neil Gaiman, addressing the 2012 graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

Make it on the good days too.

LINKS:
[1] Neil Gaiman: Keynote Address (2012-05-17) [www.uarts.edu]

[photography] Bokeh

I was looking through the Photo a day 2012 Flickr Group and saw Day 27- Somewhere you went by Stacey Quinn, which then let me onto her photostream where she has several interesting bokeh images. What is this? How do I do it?

And hence the investigation that led to this post

The creative use of background blur (and Bokeh) can often be a very useful compositional element. The term comes from the Japanese word boke (暈け or ボケ), which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (ボケ味), the “blur quality”.

Larger aperture works best, so use a low f-stop number like f1.4, f1.8 or f2.8.
Time to pick up a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, lucky for me that JB HiFi Ted’s Cameras has them on special this week

By using a filter we can ‘shape’ the image’s circle of confusion. I have based the filters on the cardboard sleeve design used in the DIY – Create Your Own Bokeh tutorial [1]. The first trial was a ‘flower’ using a metal punch, this worked quite well with the sharp edges producing a clear image.

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For the second trial the shape was a hand cut person, this has less sharp edges and produces a more blurred bokeh.

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Using the filter with a multiple light source through the leaves of a tree gives an unusual effect;

From the World of EOS:

Next step: Sharp foreground images with artistic bokeh backgrounds.

LINKS:
[1] DIY – Create Your Own Bokeh (2007-Apr-25) [DIYPhotography.net]
[2] How To: 7 Quick Tips To Create Bokeh With Digital Camera (2010-Apr-15) [Photoble]
[3] Bokeh [wikipedia]
[4] About Bokeh [bokehtests.com]
[5] Bokeh Test [www.rickdenney.com]
[6] Bokeh and Background Blur [bobatkins.com]

[TED] Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

From TED Global 2010;

About this talk
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
– TED

Sugata Mitra’s new experiments in self-teaching

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be.
– Arthur C Clarke

If children have interest, then education happens.
– Arthur C Clarke

SOLEs: Self Organised Learning Environments

I think this is more ‘directed discovery’ than child-driven education, but this is very much the way we approach our JOTI/JOTA activities.

The hole in the wall project
This video was recorded during Sugata Mitra’s conference at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide Though Education.

[TED] Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

About this talk
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
– TED : TED2010, Filmed Feb 2010, posted Mar 2010

Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge [TED]

Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge

Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life’s most valuable lesson: “I can.” Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents.
– TED India 2009 [TED]

What will you choose?

Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 09:06:52 +1000
From: Tracy Clark

My question to all of you is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question.

“When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?”

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. “I believe, that when a child like Shay comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes, in the way other people treat that child.”

Then he told the following story:
Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, “Do you think they’ll let me play?”

Shay’s father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging.

Shay’s father approached one of the boys on the field and asked if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and, getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said, “We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.”

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on glove and played in the outfield. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. Should they, at this juncture, let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game?

Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible ’cause Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least be able to make contact.

The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay.

As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.

Instead, the pitcher took the ball and turned and threw the ball on a high arc to right field, far beyond the reach of the first baseman. Everyone started yelling, “Shay, run to first! Run to first!” Never in his life had Shay ever made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, “Run to second, run to second!”

By the time Shay rounded first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions and intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman’s head.

Shay ran toward second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases toward home.

Shay reached second base, the opposing shortstop ran to him, turned him in the direction of third base, and shouted, “Run to third!” As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams were screaming, “Shay, run home!”

Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the “grand slam” and won the game for his team. “That day,” said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, “the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world and to his.”

AND, NOW A LITTLE FOOTNOTE TO THIS STORY:
We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices, people think twice about sharing.

The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces.

If you’re thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that you’re probably sorting out the people on your address list that aren’t the “appropriate” ones to receive this type of message. Well, the person who sent you this believes that we all can make difference. We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the “natural order of things.” So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up that opportunity, and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

You now have two choices:
1. Delete
2. Forward

…

[1] Google:”The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed.”