If MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life aren't giving you enough social networking in your life, now you can share your budding vocal talents with web users everywhere through SingShot, a website devoted to creating, sharing, and commenting on other people's renditions of "Yesterday" by the Beatles or "Crazy" by Patsy Cline.
A site like this could be quite useful in education - vocal students, instrumentals or actors and performers could post their work and invite critiques and suggestions from other users. However, it would run into problems with student privacy laws if done in connection with an institution or course.
A commentator at Slate comments on using SingShot.
I started belting out songs—"Heartbreaker," "Independent Women"—that I would've never dared to perform in front of a live audience. I stayed up nights recording take after take, track after track. But to my chagrin, the bleats that came out of my throat sounded feeble. My voice cracked on high notes; I had trouble with rhythm. The main advantage of a karaoke Web site, I learned, is that I could humiliate myself 24 hours a day.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Edugames are no edufun
Slate has a little opinion piece that deflates the idea of using video games in teaching. The author compares trying to teach using video games to "putting Velveeta on broccoli" - the results aren't necessary fun and are more like a chore than anything else.
One of the bigger profile projects in higher ed the past few months, besides the sudden fetish among educators for "Second Life", has been UNCG's Econ 201, an entire course that's taught through the video game medium. I saw a demo of the thing and, quite honestly, thought it was rather silly - the whole world of cartoony aliens with silly names invented for the game look like something your "hip" dad would develop that he thinks the kids would find "cool".
The whole look of the game seemed outdated even before the ink was dry on the programming code - visually, it takes inspiration from SciFi channel movies of the week and second tier PlayStation video games.
article at Slate
One of the bigger profile projects in higher ed the past few months, besides the sudden fetish among educators for "Second Life", has been UNCG's Econ 201, an entire course that's taught through the video game medium. I saw a demo of the thing and, quite honestly, thought it was rather silly - the whole world of cartoony aliens with silly names invented for the game look like something your "hip" dad would develop that he thinks the kids would find "cool".
The whole look of the game seemed outdated even before the ink was dry on the programming code - visually, it takes inspiration from SciFi channel movies of the week and second tier PlayStation video games.
article at Slate
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