Happy New Year for 2010 from the ICT Tutor blog.

In 2009 there were a total of 12 blog posts posted on the ICT-Tutor blog, including this one.

We also move web hosts once or was it twice. In 2010 we may take a new direction, or close down or amalgamate or something, very uncertain times we live in.

Theatre Breaks Video Shows how to Storyboard

Here’s a very easy to use storyboarding tool that’s lots of fun as well.

All you need to do is write a playscript, then input the dialogue text to the animation generator and it will create an action orientated cartoon movie video with talking head and body characters.

What a great way to visualise how your playscript might work when it’s performed by real actors.

The softare used is called xtranormal

I have a big imac 24″ at my disposal normally, but for portability I decided to go with a Windows laptop, mainly for economic purposes. There’s a big computer fair near where I live every weekend selling mostly hardware at very competitive prices but very little Apple equipment passes through there.

Mostly all I need is a web browser so the platform doesn’t matter much. The first thing I’ve missed so far though is Skitch, the screenshot and annotation utiity for Mac. I tried downloading and installing Jing but that needs to have the .net framework which is another 50Mb download – too much for my mobile dongle.

All the pointers are that as the newest generations grow up and take their place, so video will become the most important ICT. This will happen on the internet just as soon as broadband becomes fast enough and ubiquitous, which is happening already to a certain extent. YouTube has become one of the most useful resources for looking up music, for example. Marketers believe that video creates a stronger relationship with viewers than readers of text of listeners to podcasts.

On the other hand there are some distinct disadvantages of video. It tends to be a broadcast medium rather than an interactive community channel for dialogue. Also it can be a slow way of absorbing information. The fast forward button doesn’t work nearly as well as an eyeball scanning over text looking for particular items of interest. As a view, you get lulled into a slow frame of mind, patiently waiting for the video presenter to get to the point!

Now maybe a good time to reflect on the existence of the ICT Tutor blog. I’ll probably use a cut down version of Gibbs Reflective cycle.

What?

So What?

What Next?

Here is the ICT news for the UK as supplied by Google News:

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I’m occasionally asked what the difference is between IT and ICT. Normally, I’d respond that ICT is a subject for education whereas IT is what real people do. Wikipedia defines ICT as a whole load of things but particularly thus:

Information and Communications Technology – or technologies (ICT) is an umbrella term that includes all technologies for the manipulation and communication of information. The term is sometimes used in preference to Information Technology (IT), particularly in two communities: education and government. In the common usage it is often assumed that ICT is synonymous with IT; ICT in fact encompasses any medium to record information (magnetic disk/tape, optical disks (CD/DVD), flash memory etc. and arguably also paper records); technology for broadcasting information – radio, television; and technology for communicating through voice and sound or images – microphone, camera, loudspeaker, telephone to cellular phones. It includes the wide variety of computing hardware (PCs, servers, mainframes, networked storage), the rapidly developing personal hardware market comprising mobile phones, personal devices, MP3 players, and much more; the full gamut of application software from the smallest home-developed spreadsheet to the largest enterprise packages and online software services; and the hardware and software needed to operate networks for transmission of information, again ranging from a home network to the largest global private networks operated by major commercial enterprises and, of course, the Internet. Thus, “ICT” makes more explicit that technologies such as broadcasting and wireless mobile telecommunications are included.

So you can see that there’s a bit of a generation thing going on here. Anything to do with mainframes, data processing and even “computer science” was covered by IT whereas the “C” in ICT was added in order to emphasise the networking and broadcast aspects of the technology.