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The workers outside my house on October 25th. 

Outside my house they are building a big hotel in two twin towers. This will probably be the best and the biggest hotel in Reykjavik. Outside my living room I can also see  the Nordica hotel far away. I live in the quarter I was brought up in and  it is changing rapidly into the hotel and financial sector of Reykjavik. I remember few years ago when I noticed flats in this quarter were advertised as being in the center of Reykjavik and I was amused. This has never been the center to me, this is a sleepy  neigbourhood but somehow this is now turning into the center.  

Outside my house I also see the greenhouses.

They used to grow plants there because I live in the area of Reykjavik were the hot springs are which Reykjavik is named after (Reykjavik means  white smoke town - the smoke from the hot springs greeting the first settlers). Right now there is no activity in the greenhouses except this is a temporary outlet warehouse they are selling stuff from the americal naval station in Keflavik, Icelan which closed down on the first of September. The greenhouses are owned by the biggest building company and it is just a matter of time ... and demand I guess... when they will start to  tear down the greenhouses and build another office tower building or a hotel.

 The situation in Iceland has changed since I was child.

Now Ekstrabladet in Danmark has lots of articles about Icelanders and Icelandic companies.

Not all is flattery though.

Some of the articles with the most provocative titles. 

 The silent Icelanders

 Money laundering and corruption

Putin's minister received million doller bribe

Icelandic Tricks 

This has something to do with competition in the Danish media. Icelanders are buying up newspapers and have started free newspapers... Danish media companies are afraid. 

I do not follow what happens in the financial underground in Iceland but it is apparent that American influence in Iceland is now minimal. The cold war is over and the big naval base in Iceland (Iceland was invaded by Britain in World War 2, then came the Americans) seem to have done nothing in many years except create jobs for thousends of Icelanders. Now they have closed down and removed their army tools to other areas. Iceland is now  leanind towards Europe and the situation towards USA is more hostile than it has been since I remember.  Perhaps Iceland will became a member of the European union in my lifetime.  Some are sceptical and do not want that , they think Iceland is better off standing outside EU because of interests in other parts of the worlds ie. China.  When the glacier melts in the polar region of the world ships will be able to travel that route all year from China to Europe and America and perhaps Icelandic harbours will be profiting of more traffic.   

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I have started to read George Siemens book Knowing Knowledge. 

Tomorrow I will give a open lecture at my university about dissolvement of the author... how the author is vanishing in the world of collaborative intellectual production.. 

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http://skolastarf.blogspot.com/2006/11/grn-um-broskalla.html Grín um broskalla]]>

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Here is a powerful powerpoint show for educators about the shift happening in our society. It is made by thefishbowl.I found it while searching technorati for wikispaces.

 I have made several camtasia screencasts about wikispaces. Here I embed one of my screencasts:

I usually put  my screencasts up  on our streaming server at KHÍ in flash format put I prefer also to upload them to youtube because then it is much easier to embed them into webpages, wikis and blogs. The quality is though much worse.

I found out I can not link directly to the powerpoint slides while using IE. This is strange. I do not like such unpredictible behaviour. This is barrier to my doing what I whant to do. I also hate when my links is automatically changed into something else. Somehow when I changed into Firefox this was not a problem.

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These days most of my videoclips are  Camtasia tutorials. I am bored with those, it is not much creativity. For a change I decided to make 2 minutes vidoclips from pictures and videoclips I shot on the street in Raval  in May 2005. It is my pictures about street art in a run down neighboorhood, somehow the graffiti is like blooming periods on the murals that are being torn down - like a plant that has flowers just before it dies. I found the music on creativecommons.org. I like this kind music, it reminds me of the Icelandic band Quarashi. I made a webpage about Myspace especially focusing of Myspace as an art forum for musiciants 

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