The 2010 Winter Games are online now! Vote at MechanialOlympics.org to elect gold medal winners in a new Olympic event everyday until February 28th. Here is one of my favorite videos of this season, made by YouTube user blanceagle:

What Happened Here? in History mode

Dr. Lester and I were looking at the Metro Paris Subway app on a Saturday afternoon last fall and fantasizing about an iPhone app that would define a landscape through current events and history instead of where to buy coffee or ice cream. So we decided to send an application to the Knight News Challenge this year. The good news arrived a couple of weeks ago: we made it to the second round. 300 applicants have been selected from however many (last year it was 2300) applied in the first round, so a static graphic prototype and a few thousand words later puts us in front of the jurors again. Here’s a peek at our GPS device application (yeah, okay, initially developed for iPhone but created in a way that can be hacked or remixed for anything else), called What Happened Here?

This post is a little late, but still in advance of my presentation. I will be briefly introducing Web 2.0 concepts before sharing classroom projects where students have used Facebook, YouTube, and Wordpress blogs to create new media solutions to conceptual challenges. Here is the official information:

“Tweets, YouTube, Facebook, Photoshop – Embracing New Tech in the Classroom”

January 21, 2010
Faculty Development Center, CSUF
Teaching with Technology Faculty Showcase 2010

This was the first time I used Google’s Presentation (part of the Google Docs suite) to create the presentation…so it took me three times as long to put it together. The good news is that the presentation is available wherever there is an internet connection.

The redesign of the Mechanical Olympics website is nearly finished and the Turkers are working on new videos for the 2010 Games! If you want to participate, log on to mturk.com and accept a HIT from Mechanical Olympics. All you need is an Amazon account.

For a sneak preview, you can watch my growing play list on YouTube.

Upgrade! NY is organized by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative!

On Wednesday, November 11th, I will be talking about the Mechanical Olympics on a panel titled “Crowdsourced Labor: Digital Democracy or Centralized Sweatshop?” with Jeff Crouse and Beka Economopoulos at The Change You Want to See Gallery. This event is an installment of the monthly Upgrade NY! series on open source as it relates to activist and creative practice, co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. It is presented as a prelude to “Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory,” a conference organized by Trebor Scholz to take place at The New School November 12–14.

Event Details:

Wednesday, November 11, 7:30pm, The Change You Want To See Gallery
84 Havemeyer St, Brooklyn NY 11211