My Brain Hurts

www.wordle.net

What an interesting little web application. It creates word clouds from a list of text that you paste in. Quite a few options for fonts (interesting font names) and colour pallettes. This is very use for presentation slides and would creat interesting word lists for any school project.

It’s very good to know that although time moves on, young adults will continue to find zany ways to have fun. As reported in our local paper yesterday, Flashmob is a growing movement around the world with Flashmob events have already taken place in major cities such as Tokyo, London, Madrid and New York. It is described as a sudden gathering of people who spontaneously perform something unified and unusual then disperse.

A local university student had the idea to bring this to Canberra. Advertised on Facebook, participants were to turn up at a prearranged venue (Floriade) with hidden pillows and upon a given signal a pillow fight was to erupt until a second signal when all participants were to disperse into the gathered crowd of onlookers. They then moved to a nearby shopping area and repeated the event. It was obviously a lot of harmless fun that would have really had onlookers wondering what was going on.

A video of the event is naturally on YouTube, just enter a search for Canberra Flashmob. Searching simply for Flashmob brings up rather a large number of hits.

As educators we are all well aware of the need to keep an open mind and not letting pre-conceived notions cloud our judgement. Having been indoctrinated with the TV view of New York I was never really keen to go there – that thinking was a mistake. It really is nothing like the image presented on TV. In fact it was a very impressive city. Spacious, crowded, vibrant and alive. Quite the opposite of the other US city we hear the most about, LA. Apart from Disneyland the best view of LA is the one in the rear view mirror.

New York offers such a great range of attractions. Spamalot on Broadway was hilarious in true Python style. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were fascinating. The view from the top of the Empire State building was everything expected. The Ground Zero museum was a very moving experience as was Strawberry Field in Central Park. New York is full of icons that must be visited. A last minute detour found us at the Ed Sullivan Theatre but the Hello Deli eluded us.

Riding the subway at midnight was perfectly safe as was every other second of our stay, perhaps the very obvious and plentiful police presence had something to do with that.

Would we go back? Definitely. Hopefully a future NECC will be the lure.