Friday, November 18, 2011

The Importance of Being Awesome

Faris Yakob is the Chief Innovation Officer for some crowd ... likely a media and advertising company. What attracted me to this 18 minute video was not, however, his name nor the fact I had never heard of him. It was the comment on my Mashable feed that he was a founding partner of Spies and Assassins. What a great title - and on their page they are "Thinkers of Things. Makers of stuff." I love that! That and the title of his presentation which is basically that the future belongs to the most awesome.

Now, at first look, don't be put off by his style of presentation,or the fact that this is just a video of it and some of the detail on his slides doesn't show all that well. There are some very important messages here. For individuals,  business and education (at lest, I think there are). Listen for the commentary around information flow and time for effect. Make the connections between rate of development being almost infinite and the cost of technology basically zero.  Think of the opportunities that are being created daily as a result. The link between content, the media, the medium, and awesomeness.

The danger I think is that we ignore this type of thought provocation at our peril. I think Faris touches on critically important issues. It's up to us how we react and respond. Enjoy.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

AudioBoo - audio recording direct to the web!


I'll admit it - I'm a late developer as far as AudioBoo is concerned. I've known about it for a while but it wasn't until yesterday when two of my Year 9 students used it as part of their presentation to the class about Web 2.0 tools that the penny dropped for me.

What a cool tool! So - before I forget, thanks to Farrah and Isabel for showing me the usefulness of AudioBoo!
Basically AudioBoo lets you record (free) 3 minutes of audio - plenty for a brief message. BUT - you can record it directly to the web via their browser capture (and it works happily behind our firewall at school) OR their is both an Android and iOS app that lets you record via that means too! It works well.


And - once recorded, you can embed your Boo onto your site. Like this ...

So, I'm going to be a fan of AudioBoo - seems to make the process of recording nice and simple. Give it a try - or better still, get your students to give it a try. I'm sure they'll find some interesting things to do with it.