I'm glad to see the discussion continuing. And the desert image of Nebraska is a bit misleading, prairie is more accurate, though the town I live in is really just a midwestern college town. I've had this dream of creating some kind of nature retreat with creative technology built in somewhat organically... after taking a workshop or Max/MSP in chicago i noticed that most if not all the output i had seen felt very urban or very academic. i thought it would be interesting to see what kind of electronic art would be made by people in a more natural setting.
as far as educational modules go, I am definitely willing (and have time) to create content... its just a matter of doing. i'm not a particularly organized person and tend to put off the doing until i feel like everything is "just right"... which isn't often. however, i have been experimenting with using open source software to teach middle school kids various creative media techniques. my only successful attempt so far has been with Pencil, a nice piece of 2D animation software. i've been away from the after school program for about 6 months now though so I haven't done much recently. I am hoping to start again soon, and was planning on using pure:dyne as a platform for media creation. The problem is that the school media labs are all Apple computers, I'm not even sure if they are Intel or not. While this is good in the sense that I have access to all of the 'iLife' software, I am really hoping to engage the kids in a deeper use and understanding of the computer as a tool, an extention of themselves which can be changed to suit their own particular needs, rather than another product or entertainment device. i guess this post isn't saying much, just thinking aloud. I have had an idea to host a kind of introductory workshop in my home for some friends that are artists or musicians. I was going to set up a couple of machines with pure:dyne and perhaps ask some to bring laptops and maybe USB sticks and simply walk through the process and concept of a live distribution, free software, and the basics of linux audio. I feel like that could at least generate some interest locally which would perhaps help me learn to teach and maybe generate some real life documentation on the issues and questions new users have. And though we're quite spread out here in the Americas, perhaps some kind of meetup or something in the future could be interesting?
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