Summer Schools, GIFs and Life Drawing

jennymackness

I have been enjoying Pat Thomson’s daily blog posts about her 5 day course on the Tate Summer School.

I was particularly interested in the making of animated GIFs that they did on the last day, using this software. I have never made a GIF myself, although I have seen a lot, particularly in the outputs from ds106 – an open online course about Digital Storytelling. Pat has posted a link to a Tumblr site where all the GIFs made on her course have been archived. I have to say that I am not a fan of GIFs. When they pop up on a site, I usually wish there was a button that I could push to stop them, so that I could read the rest of the post without distraction. I find the constant quick flicking of images irritating. I think my problem is that I haven’t been able to determine the point of a lot of GIFs that I have seen, other than that they might be seen as a fun addition to a post. But Pat’s post made me do a search for what are considered to be ‘good’ GIFs. I have found quite a few sites where they seem to make more sense, e.g. their use to explain Newton’s cradle  or for advertising as in this Animated Bunny GIF .

Newtons_cradle_animation_book_2 Source of Gif

And I was very grateful to Matthias Melcher when he created a GIF to depict a 3D image of our Footprints of Emergence landscape  (This won’t make sense without reference to the associated research. See Publications and this presentation for research references).

output_CFbB5v

So thanks to Pat for sharing her experience at the Tate Summer School, which sounds a treat, although personally I think I like the sound of a week long life drawing class in London, that a friend has signed up for, better. Evidently according to a recent BBC News article,  life drawing can stave off memory loss, so it would serve a double function 🙂

Update 28-07-15

Here is a link to the storify that Nancy refers to in the comments below – https://storify.com/NancyWhite/the-value-of-memes-in-engaged-mobile-learing-with-

3 thoughts on “Summer Schools, GIFs and Life Drawing”

  2. jennymackness July 28, 2015 / 6:42 am

    Hi Nancy – thanks for sharing this. It looks like you have been having a lot of fun at the University of Guadalajara and what a great programme it looks to be. There seems to be something wrong with the storify link you have shared, but the other link works fine and there is plenty of information ‘out there’ about the programme. And yes, I recognise some of your accomplices 🙂

  3. jennymackness July 28, 2015 / 7:33 am

    Hi Nancy – just to say I found your storify link of Facebook and have now added it to my post. Thanks 🙂

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