Its been a while since my last photo update showing the progress of the New Build at the Garthdee campus of Robert Gordon University. As you can see the main entrance and plaza is almost complete, and the final stages of tidying things up are well underway at the south side of the library tower.
Today I gave a workshop on Codea Programming for the iPad at the Further and Higher Education Advisors Conference 2013 that was held today at the Garthdee Campus of RGU. The following photos should give some sense of the room setup just prior to the workshop commencing. As you will see from the first few images, I just had to put an array of iPad’s together to see what they were like.
Yesterdays post contained some photographs taken from the roof of the Round Tower at the Garthdee Campus of Robert Gordon University. This post as the title says includes a number of timelapse videos taken around 06:30 in the morning just as the sun was rising.
A few images of the Round Tower may also be seen below, giving some idea of the location from where the videos were recorded & yesterdays photos were taken.
The following videos demonstrate some interesting setups where as always light plays a hugely important role. The first example below is that of creating the Bokeh Effect. This is achieved using a long lens to set the background out of focus. The background has a dark card / velum lit from behind with a number of holes punched in it to allow light to stream through. Capturing an image of an object good and sharp in the foreground with the Bokeh Effect in the background can create some interesting effects. The addition of gels or coloured acetate sheets can add that extra dimension. Perhaps experimenting with a number of coloured acetates could generate a really nice effect. The addition of a reflective surface adds some really nice reflections into the mix both from the foreground object and the light streaming into the scene from the background.
Another interesting effect can be created with a zoom lens with a slow shutter of a few seconds. Varying the zoom over the time of the exposure to the imaging sensor generates an interesting blurring. You will see that the scene is initially composed with just one side on light, though the resulting exposure is a little dark, hence the addition of some additional lighting to the front of the subject solves this.
A fairly recent previous post looked at light painting, mainly from the perspective of a person creating shapes using a torch or a mobile. The video below is a different view on light painting where objects are illuminated with light. Varying the placement of the light, from back, front or even just from the top down creates quite an array of different shots.
Given that one can use black card in the production of the Bokeh Effect from the first video above another nice composition to try out is to photograph a wine glass making use of a few black cards to control the lighting / reflections of the scene.
If you are perhaps doing a good deal of product photography then you may find something like a Lastolite Cubelite to be of use, so that you can have nicely controlled soft lighting of the product you wish to capture.
Folding up one of these Cubelites can require a bit of practice.
This evening I attended a lecture organised by the BCS titled “Spacecraft On-board Networks and Vision-Guided Landers” given by Professor Steve Parkes – Director of the Space Technology Centre at the University of Dundee. A large part of the talk was focused on a technology called SpaceWire that is used in many satellites as a means for communication with a myriad of sensors. In a sense it could be regarded a little like USB but allows for a variety of network topologies rather than just the tree structure seen in USB, its also designed to function in the harsh conditions of space. Its presently being used or designed into over 100 spacecraft including the James Webb Space Telescope. In relation to vision-guided landers a video was played demonstrating some simulation software of the surface a moon/planet/asteroid. A good deal of knowledge regarding the surface is known, the interesting thing for me was hearing that they used fractal technologies to fill in any gaps in the terrain. The simulator is used to test the use of vision based landing systems.
A number of interesting websites were mentioned towards the end of the talk including the Space Technology Centre at Dundee and the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station. Another site of interest is the Earth Observation Data Acquisition and Analysis Service (NEODAAS). The talk concluded with the audience having to look at a number of satellite images and take a guess at what they were looking at. Images ranged from sand blowing across the UK, to fires and circling aircraft. It was also quite appropriate given the topic that the lights in the lecture theater were turned down really low to the level of a cinema experience or perhaps a bit darker.
If you look closely at the map below you can see the satellite receiving dishes located on the roofs of a few of the building of Dundee University.
In the previous semester I had a group of students for a module on Audio & Video Production. In the past days a new YouTube Channel was created and a selection of videos were uploaded. A week or so prior to this I had organised a screening of the videos at a Cinema located just a few minutes away from where we’re based. It was really great to spend some time in the projection room and see both a film and digital projection system.
The videos below should give you a sense of what the students produced, I hope you enjoy them. Have written another blog post giving a little more info on this.
In the previous week with my class of about 100 first year computing students we looked at the process of panoramic photography and light-painting, hence were making use of long shutter durations. This week I thought it would be interesting to go in the opposite direction and capture moments in time of just hundreds or even thousands of a second. I had seen quite a few videos in the past, about capturing such imagery, using both flash and continuous based lighting, hence I gathered together a number of these videos and made a recent blog post about them.
This first image seen above is a composite of images taken from two of the three setups that were used. Firstly the stage was set for the capturing of soap bubbles gently floating down to earth. Next the students had a chance to drop some fruit and vegetables into an Aquarium. The final option was to pour some water into a wine glass and capture the some of the detail and beauty of flowing water that we overlook on a daily basis.
The day prior to class I set out to purchase some essentials, I began by getting some PVC tape, jugs, straws and glass scraper to clear the water from the aquarium after the splashes. Having being unsuccessful in finding soap bubbles, I ventured to another shop and was delighted to see they had a good variety, hence I purchased one of each set they had, this amounted to perhaps close to two liters of soap bubbles, so I was quite sure we would have enough for the photo-shoot. The final really large and important task was to find an Aquarium, so I headed in the direction of the beach to seek one out. I looked through quite a few different aquariums, and finally settled on a glass one of dimensions 24″ x 15″ x 12″ capable of holding about 65 liters of water. So with that I carted all this stuff back to the office.
Later that night I paid a visit to yet another shop to pick up some fruit and vegetables that should make a good splash in the aquarium. Also picked up some food colouring both yellow and blue for use with the water pouring into the wine glass setup. To capture any spillage from the glass I also picked up a paint tray! So that was more or less everything.
Given the class size was about 100 a video feed was setup between the green screen room in which the photography was taking place and the computer lab where all the students were working on some Photoshop and Illustrator tasks. That way they could see what was going on as the video feed was displayed on three projectors within the lab, hence they could move between one and the other depending on how busy the photographic session was. I have used this technique in the past on a few occasions and have found it to be very useful. All in all it took about an hour to set everything up for the shoot with the help of three students and the support team for the video feed.
The following photographs should give a sense of what was taking place in the green screen room with all three stages running concurrently. As you will see bubbles were being blown, peppers, strawberries and the like were being dropped into the aquarium & water was being poured into the wine glass. Five lights were used, two for both the aquarium and the bubbles, leaving just one for the wine glass. In total this amounted to the equivalent of 5320 watts of lighting keyed at a temperature of 5200 degrees kelvin.
The following set of images give a sense of what the room was like after a bit of tidying up was done and some things moved around a bit.
The next set of images just give a sense of the materials that were used for the photo-shoot taken around two hours prior to setting up the scenes. The large Nemo sitting happily on the aquarium will probably find a new home back on my desk but inside the aquarium, in which he fits nice and snugly. This of course has the added advantage of keeping him dust free once I find a suitable cover.
The final set of images include some of the water being poured into the wine glass along with the individual shots that were combined together in the first image of the post.
All in all I would guess that a few thousand photographs were taken in the course of a couple of hours. Its probably also safe to say that the students really seemed to enjoy the photo-shoot, especially given the room was such a hive of activity. Having a number of distinct but related tasks seemed to work well, one thing we didn’t do was to capture water drops falling and splashing into a pool of water, so that is perhaps something for next time, as one can use a few techniques for this alone. If you wish to see some of these images if greater detail, then you can take a look at the corresponding Album.
One of the key elements to photography is of course light. Without light one would simply have a blank image. If you enjoy landscape photography then the magic hour at sunrise and sunset are really the only times of the day for such photography. The reason being that photography is in essence about two key things composition / framing of the subject and the painting of the scene with light.
Light can be described in four different forms, transmitted, reflected, soft and hard light. The sun on a clear day is a good example of hard light as one can see really strong shadows on a summers day. Soft / diffused light is that which you would find on an overcast day with little to no visible shadows to be seen. In the case of taking a photograph of a sunset for example you also have the ability of taking in transmitted light, in the form of being able to see the light source. Should you be located close to the sea or a lake then you can also make use of the reflected light from the water.
One of the classing photographic assignments is of course Portraiture. Often you may hear that you should always shoot with the light (sun) to your back. However by shooting into the light source you can capture some wonderful colour and highlights. A large aperture lens is also great for portraiture, thus allowing for a shallow depth of field to be created and all the emphases being placed on the subject in question.
If you enjoy landscape photography then some of the videos below may be of interest.
The following video includes a number of examples of some interesting landscape shots to the music of Enya!
Its not just light but also composition that is important to any great image. You can perhaps glean a few tips on the subject of composition from the final video.
The video above details some really fun things one can do by freezing motion varying the exposure between 1/100 to 1/1000 of a second. The camera is of course set to manual, as well as continuous capture to grab several frames in quick succession. Water is being poured into a wine glass that has been mounted at an angle whilst the main light source illuminates from behind a defused background (velum). Adding some food colouring to the water creates that additional level of drama and dimension to the shot.
The next video looks at capturing the splash of a water droplet. Again like the previous setup this is done without the use of flash photography techniques, though they both make-use of a continuous light source.
Another fun experiment to do is to capture bubbles as they float down to earth. To really freeze the motion exposures on the order of 1/250 of a second allow for some interesting shots to be captured.
One further interesting video fairly similar to the second last one in which the task is to capture a splash, instead of capturing a water drop, this time the task is focused on capturing the splash caused by the dropping of a spanner into a tray of water.
Gavin Howie also has a nice video demonstrating how to capture water splashes. Initially he uses a white sheet of paper as a background. Towards the end of the video he looks at the addition of colour to the image, firstly by changing the white balance, in this particular case he uses tungsten. The alternative option is to use a coloured background that results in some really interesting colouration on the waters surface.
If you happen to have an aquarium floating around then you can have a go at dropping a selection of fruit and vegetables in and capturing the motion of the impact and splash.
Its always of course useful to take a look at the user manual of your camera to be familiar with the settings. In the case of the Canon 600D one can download the user manual from the support page on canon.co.uk. You will see on page 88 of the manual that the Canon 600D is capable of shooting about 3.7 shots per second in continuous mode. One can find details about the Tv setting on page 94 allowing for motion to frozen or blurred.
In a recent post I included some videos discussing depth of field and how it can be affected by aperture, focal distance and distance of the object. The question that came to mind however is that of how could I demonstrate elements of photography to a group of about 100 students. Often you may gather a small group of half a dozen crowded around a camera to show them something, however this doesn’t really scale well to a group on the order of 100 or so.
To solve this problem I made use of technology to help them see the live interaction I performed with the settings on the camera itself and remotely using Canon’s EOS Utility. The room in which the students were, contained three projectors, one more or less in the middle of the room with the others at either end. To allow them to see the interaction I made use of the EOS Utility in conjunction with Microsoft’s PixelSense (Samsung SUR40) providing a table top interactive surface with which to interact with the settings of the Canon 600D. In front of the camera I placed two tables covered with some green cloth and a number of objects at different distances to focus on. You will also notice from the images below I also included a tape measure running down the length of the table.
Located next to the Camera and the PixelSense table I added a HD TV so I could readily see the interactions I was performing. Floating a few feet over the PixelSense SUR40 hung a Sony NX5E video camera suspended in space in a under-slung position with the help of a Libec Swift Jib 50 Kit (comprising the arm, T102B tripod and DL08 dolly).
The HDMI video feed from the camera was fed to a splitter box with one input and two outputs. As you can guess one of the HDMI outputs fed directly into the HD TV, the other via the use of a HDMI to VGA adapter went off to feed the three projector screens.
All in all I was quite pleased with the overall result especially as all the students could see what I was doing first hand, moreover there was no need to repeat the processes a dozen times or more to a set of small groups all crowded around the camera. After I demoed the variables affecting the depth of field I let the students to come up and have a go with altering the settings such as f-stop and focal length themselves. They all really seemed to enjoy interacting with the Camera through the use of the surface and whats more all the other students could see what they were doing as well. They also had a good bit of fun just playing with the controls of the Jib and operating the REMO30 pan/tilt head. Concurrently after I had demoed the use of the system I got them to do some multiplicity photographs in our green screen room. The others who were waiting of course to get their chance to interact with this equipment and take some photographs were busy working their way through some photoshop tutorials. So that kept them busy with three distinctive tasks to carry out.
Once they all knuckled down to work, a few 3rd year students dropped by the lab to give me a hand in moving our OptiTrack Flex 13 motion capture system to another room, thereby freeing up our green screen room purely for photographic and video effects work. All it all it was a busy morning, with lots of equipment being moved around. Fortunately I had moved all the equipment you see in the images below into place the night before. You will notice that a shadow is cast by the Sony NX5E video camera and the REMO30 tilt/pan head. I am sure with a bit of shuffling of elements around this can be eliminated for the next time. In the final photograph of the set below, you can see the setup with the projection being displayed on two of the three screens, though the far off screen is quite a distance down the lab. I had hoped to record some video of the system in use, but didn’t get around to it due to the rehousing of the motion capture system, so may give it a go the next time with the elements rearranged is a slightly better manner. I guess the question for the next class is what will I demonstrate next? Some panoramic photography with the use of a Manfrotto QTVR 303Kit was something I had considered as a possibility.
Recently I received a link to a YouTube video demonstrating how to spin a camera around the CN Tower. The video was posted a little over a month ago (17th December 2012) and has received around 125,000 views so far. One can make use of Google maps and street view to find the positions from which you would need to take a set of photographs in a circle around a tall object of interest. Then with a bit of work in Photoshop and your favorite video editor create a nice 360 – QuickTime Object VR like animation.
More recently (11th Jan 2013) a YouTube video was posted of the Space Needle in Seattle using the same technique as the CN tower video. I visited Seattle a few years ago and would have loved to have given this a go after seeing the results of the video below.
Another fun task is that of Multiplicity or essentially cloning yourself multiple times. A nice demo of one technique that could be used for this is demonstrated in the video below. Towards the end of the video the author mentions that he would give a ‘prize’ for somebody who include a hundred clones within an image. How difficult would it be to create an image with a hundred clones, or perhaps more importantly how long do you think this would take to achieve? The following post on PetaPixel breaks the cloning process down into seven steps.
I am quite tempted to give the hundred+ multiplicity challenge a go, using the setting of a good sized computer lab. Could have 50 or so clones sitting to desktop computers, perhaps another 20/30 sitting along a very wide windowsill (reading an interesting selection of books ranging from photography to C and Java!). Then would need to squeeze in another 20 or so clones in the remaining open areas. A tripod set at perhaps seven to eight feet should provide a good perspective allowing the full depth of the room to be observed and the clones to readily be visible throughout the image. The video below is another nice example of multiplicity.
Multiplicity in the Studio – Breakdown
Ensure the camera is on a good heavy tripod.
Camera settings to try as a starting point.
Manual Mode.
Sutter Speed 200, Aperture F8.
While lens set to Auto Focus, focus on an area where the subject will be, then switch over to Manual Focus so it remains the same throughout the photoshoot.
Should have one or two lights setup to illuminate the background.
Subject should be 6/7 feet away from the background to help avoid shadows being formed.
The subject itself should be lit so another light (Key light) should be used, to help fill in & create softer shadows and additional & less powerful light may be used.
Combining the images in Photoshop
File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack.
Browse for and select the images taken & press OK.
Within the Layers Window, select each image (layer) and press the Layer Mask Button.
Select the top layer, then with a black paint brush paint out the subject, making them disappear. Pressing Ctrl + I will invert the mask, hiding everything else bar the area painted out.
Carry out the masking process for all other layers.
Once finished, one may go to Layer > Flatten Image to flatten all the layers into one. A better option of course if you ever wanted to edit it further would be to save the file as a PSD to retain all the layer & masking information. To create a flattened image you could simply save the file as a JPEG.
You may also wish to crop the image to a particular size or aspect ratio (Image > Crop).
Are these fun / Interesting Projects to Try?
Do you think some project tasks along the lines above would be interesting for a group of a hundred or so first year computing students doing a module looking at graphics / photography. Do you know of any other fun and interesting examples be they YouTube demos or online tutorial example walkthroughs?
Some Possibilities for 360 Animations in Aberdeen
The tall chimney stack
The Big Wheel at the Beach
The Obelisk at Duthie Park
The following photographs give a sense of the evolution of the New Build at the Garthdee campus of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen over the course of about sixteen months. Additional detail may be seen by following the hyper-linked dates of when the photographs were taken. Beginning in October 2011 one can see the initial stages of the main building and library starting to emerge from their foundations and evolve over time to a fully clad and glazed structure. If you take a look at the photoset from the 15th August you will see some interior images. The most recent set located towards the very bottom of this post were taken on the 15th January 2013, you may like to compare these to a set taken one year before on the 14th January 2012 to see the progress made over the course of a year. Its expected that the building will start being occupied from July of this year.
Additional information about the project may be seen at http://www4.rgu.ac.uk/campusdev/masterplan. The embedded video below (from the RobertGordonUni YouTube Channel) provides a fly-through of the build and should give a good sense of what the completed project should look like, both inside and out.
The following video will give you some small sense of what it was like today during our Open Day at the School of Computing Science and Digital Media, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. It was held from about ten o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. After a half-hour registration period, visitors were treated to a welcome talk and a short series of lectures. Following on from this a number of hour long workshops were held on such topics as iPhone programming, cryptography and wireless networks. Their was also time to have a chat with Academics and see some of the demonstrations we had running throughout the day, most of which may be seen in this video. As you can see in some segments we were piping a video feed of the demonstrations happening in other rooms into one of our PC labs and projecting them for all to see.
Demonstrations included the use of an Eye Tracker to identify the area on screen a person was focusing on. A full body Motion Capture System comprising of a twelve camera Flex 13 system from Optitrack was also available to see in action. In concert with this we also had a motion tracking demo running on a Microsoft Kinect for windows, though the students who were doing the video recording didn’t get any footage of this. Also demonstrated was the Microsoft Surface (Samsung SUR40) which supports up to 52 points of interaction concurrently. If you watch all the video you may see that we certainly came close to this maximum value. All in all everybody seemed to enjoy the day visitors, staff and student helpers alike. Our next open day will be in a months time, at which point we hope to have a far larger and wider set of demonstrations to show the visitors to the school. See my YouTube Channel for further videos of some of the equipment seen here in this video.
Chris Young another member of staff at the School also grabbed hold of a camera and quickly recorded some of footage from of the Motion Capture System in operation. For more videos from Chris take a look at his Vimeo Channel.
Motion Capture System from Chris Young on Vimeo.
Time-lapse video showing the sunrise at the main entrance to Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. This video was recorded at seven in the morning on the 1st October 2012. As the sun rises you can see some nice reflections of the clouds in the library tower. The Faculty of Health Sciences (FOHS) Building reflects the light of the rising sun just below roof level. The recently constructed main entrance is also illuminated by the rising sun and towards the end of the video one can see the lettering of the universities name being projected onto the road.
As you can see the exterior work to the library tower is almost complete apart from boxing in the facilities at roof level. Given that the University is hosting an Open Day on Wednesday 3rd Oct 2012 I thought it appropriate to create these videos to help give some sense of what the campus is like, especially as all those in the city centre will be moving to the Garthdee campus during the summer of 2013 in time for the kickoff of the 2013-14 academic year.
During the summer period at sun rise one could see some really nice interactions with the glass of the library tower due to the transmissive light from the sun cutting across the atmosphere, perhaps another time-lapse in about ten months time is called for when all the work has been completed and the sun is in a more northerly position at dawn. For further detail on the progress of the new build you can see my previous post from the 30th Sept.
Saw this squirrel yesterday running along the 2nd floor windowsill of one of the University Buildings. The squirrel seems really eager to begin some higher education study (scratching at the window trying to get in), especially as this is the area that houses our PhD students. I guess I should not be surprised as it is Freshers week after-all.
The weather today was once again wonderful, so I ventured up Kincorth Hill to get some panoramic shots of the city, with a particular focus of how the New Build at Robert Gordon University, Garthdee fits in with the surrounding landscape. Hopefully the following photographs will provide you with a good sense of the area and how it fits into place. The following brochure provides some very useful information detailing the walks available.
As you can see from the listings below all the other blog posts relating to the new build at Garthdee have been detailed. It has been about six weeks since my previous post, hence the need for a major update. It has been a busy time with Honours and MSc students preparing their reports for hand-in at the end of the semester. All the past month has been occupied with marking.This past week has been rather surprising as the sunshine has come out in force, with temperatures hitting 20 degrees or so. Given the weather was so good, I decided to take photographs of the current state of the new build from all directions – North, South, East & West. This should give you a very good indication of the present state of progress. Enjoy the photos, it would of course be useful to take a look at some of the previous posts on this topic to get a sense of how the building has progress over the past months. You will also find links to some photographs of a few other campuses that may perhaps inspire the mind.
Picasa Album of all the photos in the set. Those displayed on this blog post are just a selection from same.
Where were the photographs taken?
The following map should give a good idea of the rough locations from where the photographs present in this post were taken. The first batch were taken from the south side of the river starting at 10:00, whilst the images of the north face were taken in the evening roughly 18:00. Between these time I walked out westwards along the rivers edge, hence some images from Inchgarth Reservoir and continued out all the way to Culter and back for a total of 30 kilometers.
View New Build Photo Locations map.
Previous posts showing the progress of the build at Garthdee
11th April 2012 – Tower Crane Removal
8th April 2012 – Progress Update
26th February 2012 – Progress Update
8th February 2012 – Progress Update
22nd January 2012 – Progress Update
14th January 2012 – Construction Time lapse
14th January 2012 – Progress Update
4th December 2011 – Progress Update
29th October 2011 – First set of photographs showing progress to-date
Photographs of other University Campuses and Buildings
18th May 2012 – University College Dublin
17th May 2012 – Dublin City University
15th May 2012 – Western Gateway Building, University College Cork – Computing, Maths & some other units
30th March 2012 – Sphere within Sphere at Trinity College Dublin
29th March 2012 – The Quad and Honan Plaza at night, University College Cork
University College Dublin was originally established in 1854. The campus covers an area of 365 acres and is located just a few kilometers south of the city centre. Official website ucd.ie.
This is a short photographic tour of the Dublin City University campus. It was established in 1975 and gained University status in 1989. It is located about 5km north of Dublin city centre. One of the very well known buildings on the campus grounds is the Helix which is used for concerts, graduation and the display of art exhibitions. Additional links: DCU website, the Helix.
I recently read an article titled “‘Beyond the call of duty’:lecturers top unpaid overtime figures” published by the Times Higher Education (THE) on the 24th Feb 2012, that on average academics work an extra 9.6 hours per week above and beyond the the call of duty. How on earth this figure was calculated I have no idea as 10 hours a day five days a week is quite a conservative amount. One of course also has the weekends to catch up on all the stuff you just didn’t get around to doing, and also gives you a chance to make a start on the stuff for the following week.
Even with a very conservative estimate of 60 hours a week, I am quite sure it is save to say that most academics don’t come anywhere close to getting all the work done that they would have liked to / ideally should have completed, even given a 60/70 hour week. This article on academic hours and glass ceilings from universitydiary.wordpress.com indicates that many work 70+ hours a week, some reaching perhaps as high as 90. This is certainly a far more accurate estimate especially when one considers the balancing act of Teaching, Administration, Email, Meetings, Organising Events / Activities, Research, Commercialisation & general interaction with colleagues that most academics must contend with.
One may also find this article quite interesting again from THE. Given the mapping of a 35 hour standard work contact to 168 hours a week, I would estimate an ideal (although still perhaps conservative) week for an academic should come in as at least a 284 hour week (thus allowing for a 70 hour average + an additional two days to catch up with all the stuff one should have ideally got around to).
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
Well it has been three weeks now since I created this blog, signed up for a twitter account & created a YouTube channel. On the YouTube side of things it will be three weeks tomorrow since I uploaded my first video. So the question is has it been worth it?
Early on this past week I visited two Secondary Schools to run some workshops on Building a PC and Computer Networking. I mentioned that I had recently entered the world of social media, and judging from a significant rise in YouTube channel views directly after I would guess that many of the students went and took a look. I had at that stage uploaded some videos showing the progress of the New Build at Garthdee (have also been able to share these updates with staff in the School of Computing), so they could get a sense of where they would be studying if they were to pursue the subject area of computing at Robert Gordon University. I also had some photographs of a computer museum + YouTube video of the NeXT cube (the type of machine used for the worlds first web server), so I would imagine that being able to see some images of such a machine is far more engaging that just reading about it from a textbook.
On that note I received a retweet from the Museum (Musée Informatique, in Paris) which I was really surprised about. This in turn lead to a retweet by Festival International de l’Audiovisuel & du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine. A Multimedia Festival being held in Montreal, Quebec 9th – 12th Oct 2012.
Another interesting thing that happened was that I received an email from a student in Marketing hoping to conduct a survey during one of my classes on how computing students go about purchasing their own personal computers. Having replied back I enquired as to why he had chosen to ask me this question. The answer that came back was mainly due to having an active social media presence – thereby giving the impression of being more approachable. Could it be that given the majority of our students are of the “Millennium Generation” i.e. have grown up fully immersed in the digital age that they inherently prefer to engage with Academics who readily make use of these social media channels.
Yesterday I hosted our first Research Seminar of 2012 having invited Dr. Judy Robertson and Mr Andrew MacVean from Heriot-Watt University to talk about the work they are doing on Exergames. After the talk I searched on twitter and found that they both had accounts & thanked them for coming along and giving the talk. Quite a few speakers I had invited in the past year were also quite avid users of twitter and WordPress as well as several of the invited speakers due to give some talks in the coming months. The Principal of Robert Gordon University has been using WordPress and twitter for quite a few years now. From what I have seen over the past weeks there is certainly a growing trend of Academics readily embracing the world of social media. Not only should one have a presence in the lecture room or lab but also in the wider global community. Why should the sharing of knowledge be confined to just the lecture room or lab – people learn is so many different ways. With just a quick search on your favourite search engine you will find that many Academics are broadcasting tutorials and lectures on YouTube and other similar streams. Certainly the world is becoming a much smaller place, thanks to global communications and social media networks. Are there only positives to be had by embracing social media? Are these forms of communication a useful source for CPD Continuing Personal Development – with the ever-increasing rate of change in the present modern world one must continually learn and embrace new things just to keep someway up-to-date with all the technological advances happening in the world around us, else get lost in a deluge of ever diversifying new gadgets. The digital age is well and truly here the only way forward is to fully embrace it (especially when one is working in the field of computing).
In this day and age particularly in the field of research the term “impact” crops up time after time. How is the proposed research going to impact the research community and the wider society. How can the results of the work be disseminated. Certainly there is something that can be said for how new results and knowledge can be shared to a wide audience through the means of social media in a near instantaneous fashion. My Influence (Klout Score) has increased from 20 to 29 in the past week since signing up less than a week ago. The publishing of conference papers and journal articles often means that work is 6 or even 18 months old before it is really shared, by this stage it may be considered old news! One has often hears the term “six degrees of separation” does this still hold true in the digital world of social media or has it brought us even closer together?
All in all I think it has been interesting to explore what is for me a new realm of the “Internet”. With the second semester of classes beginning on Monday it will be interesting to see how I may make use of these Social Media tools to more readily engage with the two hundred or so students I will be lecturing to over the coming twelve weeks. If I do make use of these tools in my teaching it is not just my students who will directly benefit, but also all those secondary school students who started following me on twitter, they can begin to get a sense that University is very much unlike Secondary School and of course anybody else following me or just happen across my channels. In summary, semester two should make for interesting times.
