Learning with the Fang

Did you start this?
Know who did?

I would be grateful for any hints leading to the original creator(s) of this work. I think it makes a fascinating study in photographic mash-ups, copyright, creative commons and remix culture in general.

UPDATE:

Thanks to some great detective work by Graham and Leo we now know that the photo was taken by Mark Khademi from Milson’s Point and that it was featured in online galleries by both the BBC and the Australian (which could well account for all the un-attributed e/mail that followed).  So Mark, if you are reading this, I would love to know if you are cool with the re-use of your image and if you can shed any light on the first person to re-mix it by adding the large lizard.

I am trying to track down an attribution chain to the person who took this photo and the first person to photoshop it (adding ye olde lizard). I first saw “Godzilla – Sydney Dust Storm – by Julia” on Flickr

It kinda freaked me out because it reminds me of a print of the image below I have behind my desk (which has a story of its own).

- this one (Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by avlxyz) [cc:by,=] (1600 x 1071)

The comments on this one indicate it was received by e/mail and point to two other versions:
- Grrrrr! Sydney Red Dust vs Godzilla
- Godzilla in Sydney
A further clue is given by – rahsoft, ah, thanks for the tip. i got the original in the same email… taken with a Nikon D60 at 07:40 GMT+10!

Grrrrr! Sydney Red Dust vs Godzilla
Was Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by glossy_mirrorplanet [C] (1600 x 1071)
Who is not the original author but points out it has been circulating round the net.

Godzilla in Sydney
Was Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by The Gee Spot [C] (1024 x 685)

So, if you can help track down the originators leave a comment.
Ta.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

godzilla sydney mashup reddust

Somewhere near the intersection of technology and human desire lies great opportunity for a better way of doing things. As we begin to break free from the irons clapped on us by the industrial revolution, we need to learn how to ask better questions, how to co-operate and play more productively so that we can (rapidly) iterate toward new solutions to increasingly complex and more urgent questions.

UPDATE: (some definitions)

Transdisciplinary – What sets transdisciplinary studies apart is a particular emphasis on engagement, investigation, and participation in addressing present-day issues and problems in a manner that explicitly destabilizes disciplinary boundaries while respecting disciplinary expertise.

Design Thinking – is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. See also “thoughts by Tim Brown“.

While travelling to the city on the tram today, this TED talk video offered the framework of ‘Design Thinking’ as a way to co about innovating solutions to big questions. Having spent much of last night producing and publishing this podcast on ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (and the past five years immersed in the world of ‘social media’ or ‘Web2.0’) I saw some important connections between, and opportunites for blending, the philosophies of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Trans-disciplinary Scientific Research).

Let me being by listing some of the connection points and recurring themes:

• Prototypes – playing around with possibilities by constructing quick, cheap prototypes of things. Central to my work in Proof of Concept (PoC) projects which seek to promote innovation through iteration.
• Play – a key ingredient in emergent behaviour, playing around with stuff leads to interesting possibilities and great questions.
• Build in order to think – closely connected with play and curiosity driven research.
• Diverge to create choices over Converge to make choices
• Expand – pure reductionist thinking and methods have served us well in the scientific method and will continute to do so. While we are busy learning more and more about less and less, we should take time out to expand our horizons from time to time.
• Design is too important to leave in the hands of a ‘priesthood of designers’ working on an ever shrinking canvas and smaller questions.
• Embrace complexity – we will need to do this as we get together to look at big questions. (it has been suggested elsewhere that we would do well to educate future generations more about statistics than calculus).
• Work at the boundaries – one of the key tenets of Transdisciplinarity is to step outside the comfort zone of a single discipline, go beyond collaboration with other disciplines by working at the boundaries. Warning: will expose one to risk and possibly the need to develop new language. (worth it).
• Embrace Risk – learn to fail cheaply and often.
• Open Co-operation – pass it forward, share.
• Culture of active participation – over passive consumption.
• The renaissance scholar and modern science.
• Swim up-stream and be counter-cultural.
• Trans-disciplinary does not replace traditional research – is an added component.
• Embrace ambiguity, human complexity, exploratory, interpretive, participatory culture.
• Immersive and experiential, community based, lifelong learning, perspective broadening.
• Tension between agility and rigour.
• Speed the Process of Innovation through prototypes, enabling more breakthrough.
• Exploit opposing ideas and constraints.
• Balance desirability with technical feasibility and economic viability.

These are the elements Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace and I have been trying to combine in our vision for LifeKludger – ‘an ecosystem for enriching human life’. It might be easier to suggest how some of the elements of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Transdisciplinary Science’ may be combined in the context of a research institute at a University (since I am currently involved with several at the University of Adelaide).

Before I attempt to articulate this lofty concoction, give me some time to go back and re-listen to the inspiring material, update my list of elements and get back to you in a new blog post. Meanwhile, as always, I value (nay covet) your comments to help me as I think out loud.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Note to self: Keep an eye on the #CDBQ twitter hastag mentioned by Tim Brown in his TED Talk. Also possibly related: abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor

This video of Professor Tanya Monro featured on the AdelaideNow website contains re-mixed footage shot by other people! This is a VERY GOOD THING which represents the first fruits of something I have beeen trying to achieve for a very long time.

Over a year ago, I convinced Prof. Monro to  fund the shooting and purchase of some video footage that we could publish online with an open license. This effectively grants PERMISSION IN ADVANCE to anyone who might want to re-use that material. Up to now, the only person who has actively re-used this footage is me, preparing educational and promotional resources for the University of Adelaide.

So, what are some of the things I have been trying to achieve?

• Leadership in appropriate strategies for re-use of digital material in the context of online social media
• Promotion of some excellent research by passing interesting stories through social networks
• Efficiency in the very costly process of creating effective digital stories
• Protection of valuable brand and IP assets through careful selection to manage risk
• Prototype an ecosystem for multi-generational re-mix of digital assets for both research and teaching & learning

How does this early example of re-mix rate against my lofty goals? I’d say we score 6/10 based on the following criteria:

• Efficient – at short notice we conducted brief interviews & provided links to existing footage with minimal disruption to labs
• Effective – a good, new story has been created and shared on a high traffic site
• Correct – appropriate footage was re-used (in fact, some of it was ’second-generation’ that is based on footage that was already re-mixed)
• Social – passing links to the video through twitter and facebook resulted in a measurable increase in views of the video in a very short time period (from 10 to 40 at the time of writing, within hours of publication). Compare this to the average of 0-5 views of other videos published on the same site, earlier on the same day.

On the down-side we missed out on:

• Attribution – the only requirement stipulated by our open (cc:by) license is that some form of attribution is given to the source of content. Ideally this would take the form of a hyperlink like this: “video materail courtesy of Prof. Tanya Monro“
• Possibility of future Re-Mix – the streaming video on AdelaideNow site is difficult to download and is locked up under Copyright (i.e. not openly licesed). This means that this story will die when the video ‘ages off’ the AdelaideNow archive. Furthermore it is effectively sterile and very unlikely to ‘re-produce’ because of the restrictions just mentioned.

How could we do better next time?

• Attribution – it would be enough to mention the names of contributors to successive generations of video content in some form of credits in the video itself. For example video courtesy of Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro covers it. Better still, hypertext links in the copy surrounding the video might reward the contributors with visits to their websites, downloads of their material and possibly further re-mix of their work. That could be achived in a simple sentence “video courtesy of  Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro .” Even better still something like:

Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.
Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.

• Downloadable for easy re-mix – in addition to the streaming video, provide links to easily downloadable versions in appropriate formats for editing. For example this version of the ‘GreenBeamMeUp’ sequence is available as medium resolution quicktime and mpeg-4 while this version of it can be downlaoded as high resolution DV-Video (which is how it was shot). p.s. As a side note – trying to prevent downloads by only offering streaming video is a complete joke. Worse still the futile act of crippling the content with DRM locks and the like.
• Open License – granting permission in advance to would-be re-mixers is a very potent thing to do. The cc:by (Creative Commons, Attribution) license granted to carefully selected material from Prof Monro’s labs places only one restriction on future re-mix – that of giving some form of Attribution. As re-mix culture evolves, I predict that any material not licensed as openly as possible will rarely be discovered, seldom re-mixed and will therefore dissapear out of culture over time. Notice what happens in the advanced search tabs of google and flickr – when selecting material you are free to re-use and modify, even for commercial purposes, only the most openly licensed material is returned in the search results. Think about the impact of that.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

remix, ccdrm, video, coephotonics

I was having a bit of a play with realtime RSS over on my wordpress.com blog earlier today – which got me thinking… Does this mean that ye olde blogging will become cool again?

While distributed approaches to realtime updates like RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub be architecturally superior and more scalable than centralised serivces like twitter, I kinda doubt it. My optimism for the potential of distributed publishing platforms (like old-school blogs, rss feeds and aggregators) dampens each time some new fangled central service like myspace, facebook or twitter comes along. Anyone else noticed how hard it is to get a discussion going in the blogs these days? Find yourself tweeting every time you publish a blog post??

While I doubt that blogging regularly and subscribing widely will ever be as fruitful as it once was, I’m looking forward to see what these new realtime extensions bring to that experience – which has served me well for over five years now. While we wait here are some of my thoughts from my earlier post today:

My RSS feed now realtime tks to wordpress.com for implementing rsscloud

September 15, 2009 by mseyfang

Haven’t been able to use scribefire on my blogs for ages.
Just updated to v 3.4.5 – lets see if this works.