I missed the Edmonton Photowalk last weekend because we had to be in Calgary, but I did get a chance to get out to the Zoo. One of the new (I think) exhibits is a Butterfly conservatory. Filled with all manner of fluttering color, it was quite the place to stretch one’s photographic chops. I spotted these two and started shooting and instantly gained an appreciation of how fast butterflies can move their wings – just as fast as bees (perhaps it has something to do with the hover). My big challenge was that I had to be able to trust my shot beyond what it showed on the review screen.
Karmically, butterflies must be flapping their wings as there seem to be all manner of changes afoot, I just have to wait and see how things work out.
I took this one at the CeLC last month and it seems to fit with what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. Taking notes like a mad man. I was originally trying to compose this shot with an iPad right next to it, but then the iPad shifted, so I decided to get this one – kinda stock, but I like it all the same. Hopefully all my notes will allow me to one day get an iPad. Even though I still have reservations, I’m starting to see how thinking about it as an ephemeral portal to data and that thanks to the massive weight of market/mindshare that has developers going nuts over it, many of the limitations are going to be remedied by apps and when multitasking comes in Octoberish, it will be a “whole new device”. I just hope that those OS updates are free and that Apple doesn’t “two-state” this device as they did the iPod/Phone.
Finally a comment on the shot – I always feel that it could stand to be brighter, but when I adjust it, it never really comes out the way that I want to, and it seems that this is the only shot that has been like that for me.
Well, I’ve seen spider egg sacs before, I’ve seen baby spiders before, but I’ve never seen a… well ball of baby spiders like this before. It reminded me very much of Charlotte’s Web. They were moving as a flock. At one point, they had been washed down from where they are in this image and then they worked together to get back to their original site. Quite amazing I must say. I was hoping to get some more angles (I also wanted to get a more dispersed shot that I could have got each time a small breeze caused the critters to scatter), but since I was doing some construction at the time, I had to move quick and get back to the hammering and torquing of the the various bits that were being put together. Karma wise, I’m hoping the new start for these little critters reflects the new start that I am looking into over the next few weeks.
Just after I posted yesterday about the knee jerk reaction, and I started to get hits from a number of sources (thanks to an OLDaily link), the bubbling that I referred to started to get going, and after the lighter thoughts had left, I was left with something odd at the bottom of my brain… maybe that knee jerk reaction has more to do with the impression that many people in the education world have of never having enough funds. It certainly seems to be the case with public institutions, as I don’t know many private educational organizations that are complaining too loudly about the actions of BB. In fact, they might see it as a net gain as they can essentially outsource even more functions to a single trusted corporation. But public education seems different.
In the public education world, people are happy with “negative zero” budgets – happy that they have a job and trying to make due with budgets that never really grow at any rate fast enough to keep up with anything, much less get ahead (if they even come on a regular cycle). Public education leverages open source – as D’Arcy mentioned today – to save those pennies (spending time over money, increasing that intangible worth of the organization) and when they do spend money, it tends to get spent on those smaller solutions (like Elluminate once was) that are kindred and sensitive to the plight of the education sector. Education doesn’t have a lot of money, so don’t expect us to pay very much for things (it’s a sad lament and an even worse comment on our educational priorities).
But then when a smart company comes by and starts to assimilate all those little dollars into larger sums, public education seems to take notice all of the sudden. But here is the catch, a smart company sucking up all those little line items into a larger one (plus a handsome little buffer for the convenience of a single bill), doesn’t fit into public education’s world of changing budgets and it’s ethos of growing small ideas into larger solutions. One large bill means that if you can’t make the payment one year, you may or may not be able to provide service that year. A number of smaller bills means that you can pick and choose what you want to pay. Perhaps not the smartest way of doing things, but that seems to be the case for public education. Public education likes to be “cheap”. It seems to revel in it’s ability to make do in spite of what the world thinks is “real”.
So maybe that reaction to Collaborate was because of the money angle. The assimilation of all those line items and the individualization that comes from having those options evaporated when the “suits” decided that all those little items were to be assimilated. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few months and years to see if we were just doing a Chicken Little or if there was something real to be concerned about. But in the mean time, I think this does move education one step further into one of two camps – one open and one closed. Determined not by the haves and have nots, but by how individual one chooses/desires to be.
Disaster? I don’t know, but if you want to see what I’m putting into my PhD paper, you can get a preview through my Delicious account. If you want to see what I’ve tagged so far – take a look.
I know I’m guilty of this myself, but I caught myself wondering while I was out for a run this morning… is the edtech-sphere disliking the BB Collaborate announcement because of some real concerns with regards to BB and how they do things to those systems that they acquire, or is it something more “religious”?
Part of me thinks that it might be more the later. The religion in Higher Ed at least seems to be one that sees “large corporate” as something that doesn’t really understand Education. We (edtech) will take the offerings from those corporations that are not directly within the Education market and use them for all their worth (MS Office anyone?), but when it comes to the Education market proper, it seems that we like the “little shops”. We like the local, the agile and the ones that really understand the ultra narrow niche that each of us find ourselves in. So maybe that is why, when an 800lb gorilla like Blackboard shows up and starts to climb the towers, we start to react the way we do. “How can that gorilla understand us?” we ask, “we aren’t the same as that other institution down the hall/road/river/planet, we can’t use the same tools”. I don’t know if this is right or not, but I think it is certainly something that I’ve thought myself on occasion.
The other part certainly seems there being kernels of truth in the former. BB, as a corporation will make choices that are designed to improve it’s own operations and deliver profit to the shareholders on an annual cycle. So this means that as the company grows, things that are not moving the the proper direction are going to get left behind. It also means that it gets harder to get to your “go to people” that were able to get answers from when the acquired company was smaller.
Is this a good thing? I don’t know, but I know that like any reflex, it is not likely going to get any better. After the reaction is set off, reminding us that there is a process there, these events do a couple things really well. They remind us that it might be time to think about what we really need when we are using system x or y and if we are willing to give whatever that is up, and they also remind us that it’s good to have options and that if you stay still for any given amount of time, you will get swallowed.
Well, this may be it… my last days as staff on the U of A campus for a while. Hopefully I’ll return as a student, but as I “leave”, I remember the one landmark that I used to use every time I was wandering around campus – the UA sculpture. I forgot why it hooked onto it as a landmark, but I did. Over the years, it sat alone on the hill, until a couple years back, that hill sprouted one of the many water features on campus. Now, every lunch hour that I get a chance, I walk around campus and I’m sure to go by this area. It is almost always peaceful and I think the flowing water is certainly part of what makes it so.
This shot, being strangely off kilter also seems to reflect on where my world is right now. Parts are lining up as one would expect, new angles are framing the whole thing and despite the disruption, things are still peaceful in this new layout.
Well, if you are not on Twitter, you can be forgiven (perhaps) for not seeing the flood of “OMG BB bought both Wimba and Elluminate!” tweets as Blackboard averse edtechers start to run for the hills as the franken system to be known as Blackboard Collaborate rises.
So for those who are not already sitting firmly in one camp or another, I will offer some ideas as to what I think of this deal. First, I think it was only a matter of time before one of the two synchronous solutions got sucked up by either Adobe or Cisco. Why those two? Well, it seemed to me that even though they both have solid solutions in Enterprise, they might want to pick up some cheap technology from one of these two education centric companies. Elluminate was starting to get long in the tooth in terms of looks (though, it did what it needed to do well and could do so on almost any screen and on any pipe). Wimba, though I had limited experience with it seemed to be wanting to do more than the virtual classroom through its suite of collaboration tools. BB, well to say that it has collaboration tools is to be well… (waiting for the BB lawyers to pop up) wearing special spectacles.
Feeling that something like this was imminent, am I surprised with the BB take over? Well yes in that I didn’t think that they would have beat anyone else to the punch (or maybe I was wrong in thinking that Adobe et al wanted to buy up some IP), but no in another way. That way being that BB is a ever increasing monolith in the edtech space and as competition from the likes of Moodle grow in the traditional asynchronous tool space, the synchronous space was one where many institutions were sitting quite happy, some perhaps even thinking of dropping the static component of their LMS in favour of the dynamic. This is what I think might have scared BB into action.
BB has announced over the past year that many of it’s acquired “projects” will EOL within the next few years (Vista Jan 2013, Campus Oct 2012), so institutions are looking at their options as to staying in the BB family or going elsewhere like Desire2Learn or Moodle. Very few of these organizations are considering similar moves within the same time frame with respect to their collaboration/synchronous systems. So BB might have really just been buying some time and money to recoup some losses on the LMS front. And even more interesting is that Collaborate will sit as a standalone product (though for how long?) that will continue to connect with other systems. It seems that the rumblings that were about with regards to BBNextGen being an OS for the LMS may indeed come to light…
Please remember that these are thoughts from the sideline and are about as informed as the next blogger out there who also sits on the sides and watches the ebb and flow of technology. I may be right, but I may be wrong, either way, I think we are in for another interesting round of BB apologetics. And, I do wonder how long it will be before BB buys into the Sakai Foundation and starts playing some cards in the Open Source world (’cause you know, they can host Moodle and the like already). Maybe they will go just nuts and buy up WordPress while they are at it… now where is that bigbluebutton I was looking for…
Well, this is the Canada Day Long Weekend for many of us – and even if people don’t officially have today off, many people are taking it anyway it seems.
I spotted these leaves when I was mowing and pruning/weeding yesterday and it struck me how much like hands they seemed. So I was really happy that when I framed them, they retained that impression (at least to me).
I was planning to shoot them during the brighter part of the day, but between issues with shadows, a partially completed yard and a beat tired photog, I waited until the light was even in the evening.
The downside was that I could not stop down enough to get everything within the DOF as I had originally wanted to do, but then I got experimenting with some angles and DOF, and this 2.8 shot came out best, angled so that the OOF region is at the bottom (buttery bokeh) and focus moves through the “hands”.
This is the first time where I have thought to myself that maybe a Lensbaby might be a fun thing to try – it would make getting shot like this a little easier – I wouldn’t have to be so acrobatic… maybe when I get older.
Well this morning, I was shooting CeLC 2010 as I was all week and while I was coming back from escorting workshop attendees across campus, I was pondering some shots on campus that I might want to shoot on the upcoming photowalk. But then it hit me… I’ve got a camera right now, I might as well scout some shots. So I went over to the Arts Quad to see if there was anything interesting to shoot between the trees, birds and the like, and as it turned out there were some birds. I was about to change the ISO to 100 to get an “optimal shot”. But then I remembered what one of the discussions at the conference about shooting at high ISO and getting the faux grain effect, so I thought… I should leave it. Sure enough, the grain seems to have worked out well – the fine details of the birds are gone, but (obviously) their camouflage is accentuated.
This shot also rose to the top this week because I was able to actually meet some hidden friends and felt very honoured and humbled for the experience. Thanks Alan, D’Arcy and many others.
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