Saturday, July 18, 2009

Thing 40: Mashup on the Web

Hmm, so first off I looked at Visual Headlines and found the site hard to use because it wasn't immediately clear where to click. After clicking on "Top Stories" the site loaded a banner of pictures to accompany the story "Family Doctors Are an Endagered Breed." The pictures on the banner don't necessarily relate. They were:

  • A group of people seemingly standing in a line of sorts
  • A man with with his hair pulled back in a pony tail and a pierced left ear
  • People welcoming Hillary Clinton to India
  • A lion
  • A beagle on a couch
With each refresh, the pictures change. What is the reader to intuit about the connection between the photos and the headline? Are pony tailed men who also pierce their ears in danger of extinction? Is Hillary Clinton attending medical school while in India? Lions may be endangered, but certainly not a beagle, though beagles are an acceptable family pet. Uffda! All this means to me is that there is even more need to teach visiual and media literacy to students!

OK, now that I have ranted, I went back and looked at the site again. Each one of these pictures was to represent a word in the headline. Blech! Really, the people in India warrant an "an"? I understand the cuteness of what the site is trying to do, however, writing a computer code to match up pictures and words . . . without context . . . all under the banner of news seems irresponsible. Walter Cronkite would not call this journalism!

Also played with booktour.com. Helpful site in looking to see what authors are coming to town, the search feature could use a little work, but certainly could use this site as a starting point. Lazy Library won't work as a site for EHS students . . . outside reading books must be atleast 250 pages in length. (And when did reading short books be come something to celebrate rather than reading something that interests you?? Example--Marley and Me is a book that nearly everyone who picks it up just loves. Doesn't make this list because it is too many pages in length, 320 in paperback )

For this entry assignment, I made a first day of school outfit on Polyvore.



(Don't know why I'm getting those "drop and drag" labels. They don't appear at the Polyvore site.)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I clicked on the Rick Astley pic and my wife named that artist in 1 note!!