Tuesday, July 31st - our first official research day

In order to keep the free flow of diary (or is that dairy?) days in order, I'm putting this brief post in as a placeholder to eventually put up the video blog for this past Tuesday. It's been a busy week, with our trip to Brussels and now Gay Pride weekend here, but I'll tear myself away from the festivities and researching to post in full some time today. How did it get to be Sunday so soon?

**Updatesville:

So. On our first available research day, your delightful Wayfinding Group members spent about two hours inside planning, which does not make for good blog material. What did happen was the third of our semi-spontaneously organized group dinners, with a joint cooking and socializing effort concocted in Sunil and Jonathan's kitchens. Awesome! The group's ability to coalesce into the courtyard is really cool, even if it means that if we ever want to go somewhere as a group, it takes at least 40 minutes...

Normally on a research day, you'd figure that some kind of research-related stuff from the blogger would make it into the video, but since our research is still essentially "secret," in this entry you get a soundtrack and some Prelinger Archive footage, as well as still photos and some totally janky video of the group making food.

The video was shoved together in Windows Movie Maker, which handles all of the titling, cutting and pasting, and soundtrack blending stuff. Anyone who has a PC and wants to use this tool can check in with me for tips, or can go to the Atomic Learning Tutorial Page for Windows Movie Maker 2.

and here is my experimental film:



It may seem weird to focus on the dorms when all of Amsterdam is out there to be explored, but I figured it would be nice to contrast our interactions with the local population (Dutch and otherwise) with the way we are in the dorms, our home of the next few weeks. As for the weird added stuff, I didn't have much that I could post from Tuesday, so I thought I might as well demonstrate some of the features of Movie Maker, in case you guys want to monkey around with your videos.

Also, I know that we are shooting lots of great footage, and I think we'd all like to be able to see it...what if we continue to post our videos here, whether or not it's our assigned entry? Seems like it would be nice to have the round-up of this stuff all in one convenient spot. But what do y'all think?