Boost Blog

To continue a theme in recent posts on culture and heritage, you may have noticed a smart new widget in the right-hand column of this blog.

To mark Armistice Day on 11 November, the Digital New Zealand project, led by the National Library, has released two new internet tools that connect New Zealanders with digital content about our country at the end of the First World War.

The widget on Lunch Box – the ‘Coming Home’ search widget – lets users search digital content held by a range of museums, galleries and archives (the widget aggregates metadata – the items themselves are still hosted by the individual content partners). It’s being tested by DigitalNZ’s content partners, and Lunch Box is stoked to be one of the test sites (see the list of other test websites).

Even better – you can embed this search widget in your school’s website, wiki, intranet or blog by grabbing the code from the DigitalNZ website. (If you can’t add the search widget to your site, then you can link directly to a hosted version of the search.) What I love about this is that DigitalNZ has recognised that providing services on their website is one thing, but letting users add the tools to their own spaces and places on the web is even better. 

The second internet tool released this week is the Memory Maker. It allows people to craft their own expression of what ‘Coming Home’ means to them by remixing photographs, graphics, film clips and music using a video mixing tool. You can embed the videos once they’ve been created. Memory Maker is being hosted on the Auckland War Memorial Museum website, and several content partners have provided unique pictures, sound, text and moving images for it.

Memory Maker blurs the line between consuming and producing content. What’s sometimes called ‘remix culture’ deserves a post in its own right, but suffice to say that digital technologies have opened up new possibilities for young people to access and represent the stories of their culture by taking sound and images and recombining them to say something new, something relevant to them. Young people are producing the very media that they consume. They are sharing these productions with their peers and making them available for further remixing. 

Here’s an example of Japanese animated movies combined with popular music to produce a niche genre called ‘anime music videos’. Fans of Japanese anime are crafting image and sound to build new narratives and scenarios and characterisations – at least, that’s what I think they are doing … 

… but I digress. ‘Coming Home’ will be commemorated through to March 2009 with events, talks, movie showings and exhibitions throughout the country, all listed on NZLive.com.

This is just the first offering from DigitalNZ. The project is working with its content partners to increase the quantity and quality of metadata available and will be designing and testing other tools too. Future releases will provide fabulous opportunities for schools to use and customise widgets so that learners can find, share and use digital media. More in a couple of weeks.

(Disclosure: my husband’s company Boost New Media did the design for DigitalNZ.)

 

Related Posts:

• Liberating our digital content
• NZMuseums
• Library space for teens blends digital and print
• Publishing for 21st century learning
• Turn-of-the-century Twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 9:44 am and is filed under e-Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.