16 Billion Pixels
HAL9000, an Italian group that specializes in art restoration, preservation and high-resolution art photography on Saturday, October 27, posted an image of the “Last Supper” on their website. The image, at 16 billion pixels, is 1,600 times stronger than images taken with a 10 million pixel digital camera. With the high-resolution, viewers can look at details as though they were inches from the art work. Regular photographs become grainy as you zoom in.
Curator Alberto Artioli said, “You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see. You can also note the state of degradation the painting is in.” The project provides an historical document of how the painting appears in 2007, which will be valuable to future generations of art historians as well as allowing experts and art-lovers to study the masterpiece from the comfort of home.
A little overwhelmed
I had a lot of coffee this weekend, but just didn’t get around to posting. When I get to work in the mornings, the first thing I do is check email. MSN had a list of the 16 greatest moments in web history. Some of the things I don’t remember – must have been kind of busy during those years. It was fun to read through and I thought others might enjoy it too.
History of the Internet according to MSN
Do you agree with the article? Are there events you would add or subtract?
VW for the blind
I stumbled on this article about the accessibility of Virtual Worlds for the blind. According to Colm O’Brien, one of the team members who worked on the project called Accessibility In Virtual Worlds, “IBM believes that virtual worlds are going to be the next big evolution of the web and if this happens…it’s not right for blind people to be missing out on what the rest of us have available.”
ILT social network – what do you think?
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about some of the different social networks, uses in classrooms and training situations, and hunting down articles to help me better understand why so many people use social networks. I’ve watched my son talk to his “virtual” friends on the internet and even on the phone and tried to figure out why he feels so close to someone he has never met. There have been interesting discussions in the blogs about social networks too.
So, for the Leadership Project in the Policy and Planning for eLearning Programs, Erin and I decided to explore the use of a social network for the ILT students. I don’t have a facebook account or an account on any other social networking site, so this topic is very new for me.
We’ve found some very interesting articles and blogs about the use of social networks in different settings. Here are a couple:
If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, Charlene O’Hanlon
We would like your input on the social network to see if there is interest and to decide how to set it up. We know that everyone is very busy, but we would like your ideas about our proposal. We will keep you updated on our progress with this project.
Debra
Haven’t had my coffee yet
I haven’t had my weekend coffee yet, but thought I should post anyway. As soon as my husband gets home from pulling out an art gallery (it wasn’t pretty) we’re going for our weekend ritual. This morning before I started working on my Leadership Project, I read the newspaper. There were several interesting articles in the Denver Post about social networks. This is the first one I read and it discusses a use for social networks that I hadn’t even considered. It is “Virtual worlds can help users recover from health woes.” The article discusses how several people have used social networking sites to build confidence, get encouragement and even learn social skills.
It also said that virtual worlds are being used for other health related purposes such as medical schools using them to train doctors. According to William Sims Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation, “We’re at a major technical and social transition with this technology. It has very recently started to become a very big deal, and we haven’t by any means digested what the implications are.”
So what are the implications? How can we take this technology and use it? For instruction I found this article on del.icio.us 101 uses for second life in the college classroom.
For business to business use, this article is about how Cisco is using second life. The comments about the article are very interesting.
More Weekend Coffee
This week I found this link to the elearn space blog. The Scottish Learning Festival link includes podcasts of some of the presentations.
The article “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” reminded me of the discussion in Collins blog about social interaction. The section discussing how the changes in what people expect of new technology is interesting. “The initial rush of “wow, I can post my comments on the web to the world” has given way to “wow, I don’t feel like it”. It appears that people are getting more selfish (not in a bad way) in their use of technology. A tool has to go beyond “hey, cool” and contribute something useful. Collecting hundreds of friends in facebook gives way to creating a small network of people you actually want to talk to. After the novelty wears off, the real work of making the tool useful starts.”
