Talking Difference

Jan Molloy, Programs Co-ordinator, Humanities at the Immigration Museum describes Talking Difference, a new multimedia project from Museum Victoria with content creation opportunities for schools and libraries.

On Thursday May 9,  Museum Victoria launched Talking Difference, a multi-platform online digital media project designed to facilitate dialogue about cultural difference and promote diversity.  The project incorporates touring installations in schools and libraries, personal stories and videos. Talking Difference is funded by the VicHealth ‘Arts about Us’ program which challenges race-based discrimination through the arts.

The Talking Difference Portable Studio is a touring installation and online experience that allows you to watch, create and share multimedia. You can watch or read questions posed by members of the community and see other people’s responses to the questions as well as add comments.

The Studio toured Brimbank Libraries in 2011 creating opportunities for a broad range of people to have their say. In 2012 the Portable Studio toured regional Victoria including Shepparton, Mildura, Horsham, and East Gippsland.

Talking Difference in schools

The Schools program promotes dialogue amongst students about race based discrimination and the impact this may have on both the school and broader community. Students will have the opportunity to understand and reflect on different perspectives of identity and diversity by creating and sharing content using the Portable Studio platform.

The studio will tour schools in Brimbank and Casey in 2013.

First school placement May 2013

Essendon Keilor Secondary College is the first school to participate in the project. Students met with Transmedia academic Emma Beddows and artistic fellow, Christie Widiarto. Students will take part in a number of workshops, producing an installation around the themes of diversity and race based discrimination. The portable studio begins its residency at the school on Monday, 20 May.

Overnewton College, Casey Greammar and Hampton Park Secondary college will all be  participating in the project in 2013.

If your school is located in the city of Hume or Melton and you would be interested in participating in the project in 2014 we are taking expressions of interest at the moment.

Please contact Jan Molloy  jmolloy@museum.vic.gov.au or Tatiana Mauri tmauri@museum.vic.gov.au .

For further information, photos and videos please go to the Talking Difference website.

 

Mashpedia

Looking for an online, multimedia, real time encyclopedia? Mashpedia is just that and is worth using with students.

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The website explains more:

Mashpedia is a web encyclopedia enhanced with cutting-edge functionalities and sophisticated features such as multimedia content, social media tools and real-time information, accessible to people all over the world. It’s free to use and open for public participation, allowing users to discuss specific topics, post and answer questions, share relevant links or contribute in new creative ways. Mashpedia integrates a variety of online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, Blog Posts, and further contextual information into a single slick interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of services and features that eliminate the user’s need to visit each service separately.

The FAQ page explains more:

Mashpedia aggregates multiple web feeds (streams of content from different sources) into structured articles about specific, encyclopedic terms, historic events and popular individuals, groups, organizations, companies, etc.
Every article provides a basic definition of the term, along with the most relevant videos about it, a stream of current Twitter messages, latest news, images, blog posts and links. Mashpedia also offers semantic connections between the articles, in form of links.
Even though there are advertisements on Mashpedia, it is a worthy search tool for (at least) older students as it gives a real overview of a topic from many different points of view and many different types of media.

Flowgram

Flowgram is a total online multimedia presentation tool. 

Flowgram homepage
Flowgram homepage

Think Powerpoint with voiceover, interactive webpages, photos and more. Ideal for online conferences and even better for archiving conference sessions, Flowgram is almost as good as being there.

Here is a Flowgram on Web 2.0 by mseifman:

 Although it can be a little clunky to use, the benefits of Flowgram far outweigh the drawbacks.