The 26th Annual Zoom International Student Film Festival

From an email shared on the Communications Technology email list:

The 26th Annual Zoom International Student Film Festival is now open for submissions! The festival is open to all high school students worldwide between the ages of 14-18 and it’s free to enter. It’s a great opportunity for students to showcase their work on an international scale! The festival will take place on April 20th @ 7PM. Deadline to submit a film is April 14th. For more information about the festival and/or to submit a film go to: https://earlhaig.ca/zoom/

Ethics and Learning Technology

It’s great to hear from Dr. Chuck Severance again. I took many of his Python courses on Coursera and find him to be an excellent instructor.

In this short video he addresses privacy and LMSes and how schools pay little attention to privacy issues regarding their LMSes. He mentions how the vendors control all the data, and we have been pushing the priority of ethics and privacy concerns back.

I admit that in my classroom I didn’t know how private my students’ personal data truly was. I just trusted in the companies that hosted the LMSes (D2L, Google) that they would not abuse the information nor use it in unethical ways.

Did your school board address student privacy when it considered which LMS to use? Is its privacy policy or privacy study public? Please share!

Integrating Google Drive into Google Colab Notebooks

Why might we want to integrate Google Drive into Google Colab? The primary reason for this would be to easily access data files to use in your Colab notebooks. 

Here is a video that outlines the basic process. For written instructions, see below.

Integrating Google Drive into Google Colab is quite simple. The first step is to go to Google Colab, then open a new notebook.

Continue reading “Integrating Google Drive into Google Colab Notebooks”

The Making of a-ha’s “Take on Me” Music Video

Is there anyone out that won’t admit that a-ha‘s Take on Me is a great pop song? Or that the video is one of the best pop music videos ever produced?  I’ll bet even the most die-hard punks or metalheads will admit they’ve tapped their toe to it once or twice.

Here’s a great series of videos I found that document the making of the hit version of the song (some versions were flops) and the video that was made famous because of its extensive use of rotoscoping:

Here’s the music video, which Rolling Stone declared as one of the best music videos of all time:

If the original pop version is too catchy for you, here’s the unplugged version:

When searching for other versions of the song I came across Weezer’s version, which I admit I hadn’t heard before and had never seen the music video. It was nice to see that it also had parts of it rotoscoped, and it was even nicer to see an Apple ][ at the end (yes, I’m a geek).

I also found a swing version which I’m not a fan of, but I’ll include it for completeness:

And one more, this time by Andie Case.

If you’re a ska fan:

…or a metal fan:

And another metal version, this time by the amazing multi-instrumentalist Leo Moracchioli (also check out Leo’s Sultans of Swing cover):

Any dixieland fans?

And we’ll end with a rock version (I wonder if the Michael Jackson poster in the background diminishes the band’s street-cred at all):

There are other versions out there as well, including an extremely bad one (NSFW), Jimmy Fallon’s classroom instruments version, a ukulele version, an acoustic guitar version, and of course many live versions.

Any fans of this song? Do you remember when the video came out, and did it have an impact on you? Do you prefer any of the cover versions more than the original? Please let me know in the comments below!


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The Art of Listening – Music Documentary (2017)

From https://youtu.be/3_5MnvCUvDU:

“The Art of Listening is a documentary film about the journey music takes to reach a listener’s ear, from the intent of an instrument maker and composer, to the producers and engineers who capture and preserve an artist’s voice. This journey is narrated by intimate conversations with artists, engineers and producers about the philosophy of their work and the intent behind each musical note they create.

This film is an invitation for music fans to rediscover the intricacies and details available in the sounds of their favorite recordings. The Art of Listening is the beginning of a conversation of how the quality of our listening experiences define the medium.”

Read more here.