CogDogBlog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mrphancy

I’ve been a few weeks into using Google Chrome, and sorry Old Fox, the shiny metal is looking and feeling good.

With Firefox, it was a long running period of spending time I’d rather be browsing waiting for Mac Beachballs to stop spinning, or that pause when a cursor goes into a form field and the fox must be tapping its feet or scratching itself before allowing me to enter anything.

The tipping point for me was the direct availability in Google Chrome of most of some 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts. I’m not going hog wild with scripts and extensions, my lean set now includes:

• Flick CC Attribution Helper my own humble script that adds to any Flickr photo page that is cc licensed, two different cut and past attribution html codes- one for embedding in blog posts (used above) and another just for text (say in a document or presentation). I use this daily, or if I blog daily, I use it. A lot.
• Obviously Scrub Google Redirect Links Another key helper- I use Google search every 10 minutes to locate URLs, but their search results do not provide links you can copy easily (hmmm, it seems to change every few months, sometimes you get the links sometimes they are redirected cruft crap). This script adds a link that is the actual search result.
• GPE provides previews of full web pages from RSS view in Google Reader- rather than opening in another tab or blowing out your reader, it opens it right in Reader. Well, it used too, in Chrome it seems to want to open in a tab.
• Delicious Tools Extension cause I love to tag stuff.

Hmm, it looks like 2 of my 4 might not even be needed. Not sure what else I really need, maybe one of those scripts that provides MP4 download links from YouTube.

But the speed and responsiveness, the lack of beachballs in Chrome has been wonderful. It feels like a new springy web (that said, some of the back end pages of our NMC drupal site seem to be loading more in a staggered fashion. Not sure if it is me or the browser).

But wait there is more… A few weeks ago I started experimenting with adding Google Translation to our NMC web sites. This was really for one of our new Horizon Projects that is doing a new report for Spanish speaking countries, so all of the content is in Spanish. We had our wiki content translated, and Wikispaces nicely provides localization of the interface, so we have a nice Spanish wiki

The challenge that arose was that as part of the process, we wanted the advisory board for this project to review content on our main horizon wiki, which is all in English.

Just on a whim, in the mniddle of a meeting on this project, I surfed to the Google Translation site which was typical of all the other translation sites back to Babelfish (hey look what Yahoo picked up)– you enter either a phrase or a URL in a box and it redirects you to either the translated phrase or to a reload of the web page in the other language.

I did notice a few weeks back, that on the Google Translate site, it was actually starting to translate as you were typing in the box. Woah. Try it yourself, that is the best demo.

They offer under Translation tools, a quick and easy way to create an HTML widget you can add to your site, so if you are running any template driven site (blog, wiki, etc), it is likely one chunk of code to add. This does the translation right in place, offering something like 50 languages! And it is pretty fast– not 100% accurate, but enough to get the gist of a page in another language. In a few minutes, I made 8 wikis have this translation feature, as well as the main NMC web site

So what is even better, is say, when I have the NMC web site appear in Arabic, As I hover over a translated section, it puts the original language in a hover box, and from the menus at the top, you can quickly rever to the original language

So…. that was a long tangent of something that is a quick and easy add on to any web site to internationalize its contents, but…

I remember thinking to myself, why aren’t they rolling this directly into a browser? I mean already, GMail is already detecting when an email is in another language, and offers in place translation…

Well, it is in the newest version of Chrome, the dev version 5

Google Chrome 5’s dev build has a feature that detects the language of a web page and lets you translate it without opening a new page. The feature is borrowed from Google Toolbar, but Google Chrome is the first browser that translates web pages without requiring an add-on.

When you visit a page written in another language, Chrome shows an infobar that asks if you want to translate the web page. You can ignore the message, change the language that was automatically detected or translate the web page. If you click on “Translate”, Google Chrome will translate the page and will no longer prompt you when you click on a link from the page.

Here it is at work on the Spanish wiki- when the page loads, the browser can detect it is another language and offers translation. Slick

I may have crammed two blog posts into one as I started out talking about my being Chromed and ended up on language translation.

Just call me a króm hundur (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify the language)

This same thing happened a year ago.

In some fluke of nature because, as a state with leading indicators of worse budget deficit, lowest numbers of high school graduation rates, Arizona is somehow ahead of the curve in terms of not following the confusion of shifting clocks for daylight savings. Yes, all of the wheat farmers here have to deal with the vagaries of the natural changes of sunrise/sunset.

Our clocks stay the same year round.

For electronic devices, the code logic necessary to deal with setting the time must be simple.

function ArizonaDSTTimeAdjust() {
  # code for adjusting daylight savings time zones in Arizona.

  #ummm. we don't need any code. bye
}

My computers use network timeserver to set the correct time; both my Mac and PC are correct. My atomic wall clock is correct. My wrist watch is correct.

Yet, my iPhone is not.

With settings in Automatic mode, my iPhone reports the time here an hour later than what it is.

I can’t really explain.

Last year, it eventually caught up, a few days? weeks? later. I cannot remember.

Does anyone know what time it is?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JPLatting

from the idle wonderings department…and summoning my best Andy Rooney voice

Did you ever notice…. how short/brief flickr comments are? “nice photo” “Awesome!” “great shot” — heck you could fit 4 or 5 in a single tweet.

Think about it- a good meaty blog post (the kind not typically found here), if read in their fullest take quite a bit of mental fuel to process. For example, if Stephen Downes takes only half an hour to write his deep posts -they might take me 4 times that to read to (partial) meaning.

And such content that takes time to process yields comments sometimes in the multiple paragraph form. I’ve seen blog posts where the comments are longer than the posts.

Yet a photo you can take in within a few seconds or more, is lucky if it illicit a full sentence in a comment, much less a verb.

So do briefly digestible media (not to say all photos can be appreciated in a glance) lends themselves to brief comments? is it a dissonance in responding in text form to a highly visible message.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Môsieur J. [version 3.0b]

Or even father out on the limb, is it all a giant cinnamon bun roll up of McLuhan-esque medium is message? (what is the medium of a car body mean?)

What’s your theory? Is there a reason? Or do I just need sleep?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Stéfan

That little search field and button in WordPress has not changed in function one bit since i started with WordPress. Oh sure, you can pop words in there, and get list of results. That works. But it is really limiting, especially when you have a few years heaped up of posts.

Let me be more specific. If I want to find something I wrote about Jim Groom and car toys, if I type in the search field

Jim Groom Car Toys

My results will include posts that mention Jim Morrison, ones about Jim beam, Ones about not wanting to be a bride of a groom, ones about Dean Groom, onces about Car Shows, ones about Toys are us, and maybe after I page through 5 pages of results, I might find the one I want.

You see, the WordPress search is all OR. It matches “Jim” OR “Groom” OR “Car” OR “Toys”. And… the results are not in relevance order, I get reverse chronology, which does not help me at all in finding.

That is like Search 0.5, back in te days of AltaVista.

If I was searching in Google, I’d be smarter, and do a search like:

“Jim Groom” Car +Toys

So I get an exact match on the name, and force the results to have Toys in it (I may be less sure it had “Car” or “Truck”.

I did some quick poking at the WordPress Plugins and did not find too many search enhancements– I thought there would be a good set of them. I found ones that expand the search to include pages, tags, etc.

But then I found the Google Custom Search plugin. Now GSE is one of the lesser used, less understood powerful tools in the Google jet pack. The premise is simple- you can create your own search tools, that rather than search all 29 gazillion web pages that Google crawls, you can provide a list of web sites that it searches.

So you can create your own search, to use the Google method to search, say only web sites about literature, or only ones about christmas toys…. okay those are made up. I created one to search among a set of open education sites and one for NMC’s Horizon Project to search among a collection of emerging tech sites… a while ago Leigh Blackall set one up to search Free Media sites — in this case he invited me to join so I can add sites to the list.

Am I on drugs or is this not just a fantastic tool for any teacher? You select the sites that students search from, so they are not trolling among the entire web, or getting lost in cat videos in the results. Or even better, you have your students research and add to the list of the sites included in the tool.

Okay, I digress because I have come across very few teachers using GSE.

But this is where the WordPress plugin is clever. What you do is set up a Google CSE to search just one site, your own blog– I pointed mine at http://cogdogblog.com/

With the Google Custom Search plugin, you copy the code GSE provides into a settings field. You use the GSE approach of embedding the results in your own web site.

Now I got tripped up one something in setting it up- the idea is the the plugin routes the basic WordPress search that looks like http://cogdogblog.com/index.php?s=dogs+rule+cats+drool and sends it to a GSE, and the results that appear on a page at http://cogdogblog.com/search — but no mater what I tried that did not happen.

So I looked at the source code of the GSE search form, and went into my template. Most modern templates have the search form HTML code in a file called searchform.php. I made a copy of that as backup, and replaced the form elements with what the GSE provides– so the search box on my site sends the query to Google, and it shoots the results on my page.

This way, I can use all of the modifiers I do in a Google search, and get relevance ranked results. Another nice surprise is that it is returning things that sit outside my blog, like my presentations under cogdogblog/stuff. Woah Neoh- this is now a site search tool, not just a blog search.

Yes, I have to do some CSS work on the output. And I am not crazy about the ads (I thought of lying on the GSE form about being a registered non-profit or university). And for some reasons the search words dont come through on the form on the results page– but those are just minor things that need a fix.

I’m going to play with it a bit more, but I like it. I am sure someone will comment how I am selling my soul to the Borg by letting Google crawl all over me.

But c’mon WordPress developers, how about creating a search tool that is not start of the art 1996?

UPDATE: Thanks to Joss Winn- I completely overlooked, missed, the WP Search API plugin, which offers either advanced wordpress search or intergation with GSE. I got that one going, and it is more elegant and cleaner, though I am having some challenges on controlling the width of the output. But it seems a better.

UPDATE UPDATE: Tried switching WP Search API plugin to use the MySQL search plugin, but it produced fatal errors. The Google search was less than ideal with some more trying. I alos tried the Relavassi plugin recommended by D’Arcy, but it crapped out each time trying to index (gave up after 5 rounds). I’m stuck back now to basic old WP built in search.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by aliceskr

It’s been rattling around in the grey matter since Saturday, an un-organized strand of thoughts about the TEDxNYED event– and lacking a clever title, I made it a past tense verb (and that is something I expect no one to even spot as clever).

Just to set the baseline, I only saw about 1/3 of the sessions on the live video stream; after al it was a nice Saturday, and I had a pile of firewood to cut. So I cannot give a full opinion of the event based on the portions of the elephant I touched.

First of all, it is no small feat that the Livestream site supported 20,000 viewers.

That is astounding. For anyone who has had the ulcer inducing job of managing a live stream, there’s little joy. You hear a tsunami wave of complaints when the stream fails (often for reasons beyond your control) and a trickle when it does. I had perfect video even on my little pokey country cable internet connection in Strawberry Arizona. I also commend what i thought I heard in that a group of students were involved in the video end of the production. That is very cool.

20,000 people got to participate. Yep, that is pretty darned elitist.

So I am waiting to see thee sessions I missed on the TEDx YouTube Channel (and a small wish, it would be nice if the videos were somehow tagged or organized into playlists- I cant see any rhyme or order to the list on the right).

It was also smirk inducing when tweet after tweet was asking “Where’s the archives? Where’s the archives?” obviously not from anyone who ever had about 6 hours of raw video to edit, process, and upload. It takes time, much more than 140 characters worth.

I’m not sure I fully buy into the claims of elitism for TEDx from D’Arcy; though I can see what Stephen is driving at when he describes TED as being political. You know, throw three people together in a room for a week and office politics emerge. I recall a speech a few years ago from a couple who did some relief work on a tiny South Pacific island, like 2 miles long. They decided one day to visit the south end of the island, and their hosts got really concerned, “Oh be careful, those people down there are really scary!”

So I am keeping in mind a schooling I got from Chris Lott about how being anti-elitist can be elitist too (I think I got that right?).

Yeah, I had a similar reaction as D’Arcy when I applied to get a seat at TEDxAustin, “WTF”? (I was rejected too, but I shrugged it off). There is a problem when you run an event that many people want to attend- limited seats. So you either have it first come first serve, high price/who can pay, an “application” process like TEDx where some committee deems who gets the golden ticket, or maybe just random. But you have to limit it somehow.

I can’t see TED being closed when they make it’s contents available on live streams for free, and really, for years, they have been generous with the sharing of the videos from even the big events where the beautiful attendees shell out 6000 clams for a ticket. TED puts content out in the open; who is going to spit at that? Not me.

Boone sees TED with some skepticism, though not from a blind eye:

I’ve watched a few dozen of the freely available videos over the years, and most seem, in my unstudied view, to be little more than glorified project pimps or book promos.

I find that a bit of a broad brush stroke. Frankly, in some way when we get on stage, don’t we all pimp for something? Ideas? Our projects? Ourselves? Isn’t there at least a trace or more of ego involved?

I can dig for links, but I’ve seen a few that have introduced me to knew people, projects in an effective way — the Siftables video, any of them with Hans Roling, heck, even Mr VP who invented the internet.

And who could not enjoy Nellie MacKay singing the dog song? Actually, I have used that video a few times as an example of cleanly shot and edited video- it uses multiple cameras well, tight cuts (the shots of her feet on the petal), and assembles it without one cheesy video transition. Nary a dissolve. And damnit, I like the song!

I’m not about to say anything about what the TED event is like cause I have never been to one. And I cant really fully buy some criticism lobbed over the fence from the outside. I do know someone who went to the Big TED, and yes, it is socially stratified– isn;t our entire society stratified?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Whit Balance

But yeah, TEDxNYED… There were reactions from people like Will who had to wake up at 5:30am and post a once sentence mile long joy dump to Boone who was underwhelmed… I had a 12 watt light bulb go off in considering that in a conference audience, almost like a school classroom, there is almost this unsaid expectation that we can create the same (standard outcomes based) experience for everyone, yet that does not happen. It’s a tough challenge for a conference organizer to the school to try and find what is going to find some elusive middle ground of meeting expectations, yet must accept that people will fall off both ends. This is a conundrum of one size tries to fit all.

I did like the integration of twitter with the Livestream video, it works well. I wondered a little about about the frenzy to tweet out the “line” sound bite, you’ve hear the same key phrase “Do what you do best, link the rest” (oi have I not heard that one before?) 50 times? I had a mental picture of the hall being full of scribes or stenographers, all feversihly pounding the keyboards.

But then again, that is what happens it twitter; people are able to amplify ideas, messages, (and silly crap) quickly and rapidly by spreading through the variable shoots of their own networks. So you cant have the network effect without a lot of repetition. Yet, it did seem like a frenetic pace, and I know that the “Social media Gurus” are out there in sweaty workshops sharing how to create 140 character tweetable sound bites.

I could not see the audience, but from the remarks about lack of diversity, it was likely pretty much WGLM (white guys like me). When these comments started in twitter, I silently snarled something like, “Well maybe you should stand your white ass up, leave, and make room for someone else” — but I also knew that if I was there, I would acknowledge it, grimace slightly inside, and then probably do nothing as I would not know what I *could* do. I’ve got no answer, just this raw feeling, but the world as a whole is rather diverse on its own; but its in the smaller sub-worlds we create that we are capable of making it less locally diverse… which means then we can also make it more so. It happens through action. And foresight. And vigilance. Diversity is not a natural force of nature that operates on its own, we make it happen (or we don’t).

cc licensed flickr photo shared by vissago

So yeah, for some people being TEDxNYED-ed was an electric soul raising gospel see the light experience; for others it was a grave and pathetic disappointment, and then there is likely a whole lot of somewhere in the middle. But as humans we see the whole world only through our lenses, and I think it is a bit easy to extend our own experiences to those of others. It doesn’t work like that. Mi experiencia no es su experiencia

And watching some it play out, I had some of the old itchings about conference formats (along with some of the other tweetplaints about it being ironic to have an agenda of lectures). I love a good lecture, give me a Lessig, a Wesch, a Siemens, a Jenkins (and now a Lehmann) any day. The problem is those are the minority (or am I wrong? are there more good lecturers than bad in terms of public presence??).

But its not the value or not of a public lecture that rubs me,

Think about it in terms of media.

What is a presentation?

Well you have images. Maybe moving ones. A sound track. It starts at one point and ends at the other.

Package it up, and really, it is a video.

So what if a conference presentation was pre-recorded? it would be polished, and I bet people might be les inclined to go on for so long if they have to edit the damned thing. There would be a record for public consumption.

Okay, I will jump on that before anyone else does. We’d likely be less dynamic in front of a camera at home/office. Most screencasts are really deadly monotonic snorers.

The thing that gets me about the standard conference format is the way it fills most (2/3? 3/4? of the time with presentations- when many of us crave, and value the stuff we fill in the cracks in between. Frankly, leaving home for a week, traveling across the country spewing carbon, to come to a stale ventilated conference chicken feed lot.. to sit in chairs and passively watch the equivalent of a video (or ignore them and read email) is…. well slightly ludicrous. The way we use our F2F time at conferences is backwards. Convoluted. Twisted. Silly.

Yet I know the the conference format as a series of 50 minute lectures is not changing anytime soon (and yes, I am guilty as hell of being part of an organization that does conferences in this format). But I do want, sometime in my life, to have a conference, where the content (the contents of a presentation) is done online somewhere, and the time at the conference is spent actually doing something– rather than what the norm is– talking about doing things.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Consumerist

And so for those who got TEDxNYED-ed in person, there was that whole portion us in the 20,000 seat back row did not see; the valuable conversations and exchanges happen when the video stream goes offline, the breaks, the dinners, what happens in the smoky bar at 2am, etc. Don’t get me wrong- there is tremendous value in our F2F meetings– but we could do it a whole lot better in how we use that time.

I can’t find as much to slam TEDx as others- I am losing track of whose session or blog post (David Wiley) who talks about how fractionated and wheel recreation oriented we are in education- so there has to be some value in people from different places, who don’t work/live together to join together, and be out of our same cubes. Isn’t that all about increasing connections (right George?) and by the way, kudos to George Siemens for posting the text of his remarks making me now wanting to see the video, thanks for body slamming mr “all i can do is ride google’s monkey”.

That’s it, I am TEDxNYED-ed.

Now you can launch the rotten tomatoes my way.

I have to give Boone kudos for the idea of including random images that come up in tag search for “Ted” that are not TED!

It’s been on my to do list since August, but I finally got the last mile of code done to restore my Five Card Flickr stories site to life.

If you had not played with this before, the initial description tells it all:

I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora’s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving.

Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, produce a coherent story, or at least die laughing trying. The point is to make connections and discuss the reasons for the choice.

The idea that has been brewing is to create a web tool that works the same, but rather than drawing from a pool of Nancy cartoons (no offense to the Nancy-holics), draw from a pool of images, say in flickr– this is different slightly from the Flickr Tell a Story in 5 Frames, but presents another way of facing the challenge of telling a story in images only.

The problem with that version was the part of it that fetched flickr images with a given tag was built on some code that a tweet out got a solution from John Krutsch. While this worked, the logic was based on parsing the results display of a flickr search, and when flickr changed the output of their search last August, my code went up in a puff of smoke.

I knew that what I needed to do was to do it the right way, via the flickr API. Fortunately, I had some experience and used before the phpFlickr code library, and a few months ago I got a portion of the code redone, but left it on the shelf too long.

One task was to redesign the database a little more compact fashion and to do away with so much dependence on writable text files to store data (I was trying to be nice to the flickr API and store a local array of found photos). I also wanted to try and preserve all the bits that had been created before, so I had a few rounds of running some custom code to move and update the database.

So now the story creation parts al work again, and any photos you tag as 5cardflickr should be added to the pool (note that I poll flickr only once an hour to look for new photos).

I’d like to test it a bit before updating the google code site, but when I get the code, there, it should be easier to set up than before.

Try it now, tell a in 5 flickr photo…. http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/play.php

Again, nothing warms this web dog’;s heart that accidentally discovering something useful. With my two daily photo habits (@dailyshoot and 2010/365 photos) I am continually having to seek out specific bits of information.

For dailyshoot I check in the morning what the assignment is usually by a visit to their twitter page or checking an RSS feed). For naming of my daily photos, I use a title based on the day number of the year (today is the 64th day of the year). I usually flip open a Mac OS X dashboard widget I found 2 years ago, but I have to enter the date for it to calculate the day of the year.

In one tweet, I now have a more elegant solution, and learned something I did not know was possible.

@dailyshoot shared this message:

Tip from @lyzadanger on a great way to keep up with the Daily Shoot: http://bit.ly/apTnnc Thanks Lyza!

Basically, you use the Safari browser (just to set these up) to visit the Dailyshoot assignments page, and select Open in Dashboard from the File menu.

This presents an interface where you can size the portion of the page you want to use, in this case, the top left is always the most recent assignment:

and when you click Add on the far right, it makes a Dashboard widget from that web content- so when the site changes tomorrow, my widget will as well.

Wow, who knew one could do that? Well I didn’t.

So I went one more, and I looked for a web page that would show the current date as a day number of the year- This site from Calendar Date shows more than I need, but I clipped it to show the calendar, current day highlighted, and at the bottom in gray text it gives the day number.

Now I have both tools on my dashboard

I don’t know what else I might need this for, but knowing I can clip bits of the web on my dashboard is a nice little trick to have in the MacArsenal.

Last week I was deeply immersed (3 days x 14 hours ea) in helping run an NMC Conference in Second Life. Something that has always been obvious came knock me over with a hammer obvious – there is something perversely wrong in communicating something in a 3D space using 2D slides.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

What’s even the point?

Frankly, I’ve been in this game long enough and see what too many of us (often me, yes I am Mr Pot calling kettle black) rely too heavily on the linear slide deck to prop up what we are communicating.

It’s not that all slide presentations are bad– its just most of them are Even with plenty of people getting away from 9 point font (I still saw a session last week with some slides carrying 60+ words) and becoming more Presentation Zen-like, isn’t there still an over-reliance of being driven by the deck?

I’ve never been brave enough to do this– imagine presenting with zero slides. Jared Bendis has done this masterfully at our SL based symposia- in The Future Holds No Dignity: The Death of Ethics in the Digital Age he just sat his avatar on a prop of Lucy’s “The Doctor is In” booth and talked.

Okay, so we are not all audio virtuosos. I know I say “um” too much to do this. But I will suggest that in doing our presentations, we don’t given nearly enough (or any) effort to our voice– projection, inflection, creating excitement. It is merely us just blabbing away. Often in a monoto-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Versatile presenters like Gardner Campbell spend a lot of time preparing their audio portions, and can really carry a talk with just their voice. Cynthia Calongne, who has presented for us in Second Life countless time, is amazing smooth with an even voice that does convey a pattern of inflection, plus she is so adept at keeping the audio going as she manipulates things like interactive games for the audience.

I can hear the response already “Yeah, but he has that great FM radio voice. I am dull.” And then we cop out, and toss more slides in the deck. I think we can all to do more with our voice- I’ve heard many monotoners talk after a session with a lot more passion, and in a much more vibrant tonal range than their presenting voice. Where do we get the idea that a monotone makes us sound smarter? That stifling the emotional range of natural voice is better?

In our NMC virtual symposia, we spend a lot of effort coaching our presenters on using sets, props, and trying to get them thinking beyond the deck flipping. It is as simple in some places of doing a set like an artist studio, or maybe some props related to metaphors in a topic.

Still thinking in the 3d space, we have seen other approaches to presenting that are slideless- from more like performances (sometimes with real zombies) of Jim Groom, Brian Lamb and Tom Woodward to Kieran Cannistra and Doug McDavid doing more of a back and forth conversation (video) to others being set as a series of role plays with the audience as participants.

Even if you have slide-like content, showing them in a novel, meaningful way helps, like last week, when Kim Anubis, who’s real world company is called The Magicians, wove that metaphor into her talk with a crystal ball:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

Again, I am not saying at all that slides are bad, and that one cannot do great presentations with slides.

My colleague Chris did a great talk last week; he had slides, but he filled the spaces in between with his voice- in fact the slides did not drive his message, he drove the slides with what he had to say.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

But the energy in the place revved up dramatically, when he started doing a live demonstration:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

But more often then not, slides becomes the crutch, the focus. You focus all the effort on the cool images, and cram more in the deck than you can possible flip through.

And yes, I am raising my hand in admission I do this a lot.

But there are, and must be, different modes we can use to present that break free of Slidedeckophelia.

It’s why I relied on many times the last few years the method I concocted using the CoolIris viewer; it is still slides in a way, but with a wall of media, you can, if you plan right, do something where you can go in almost any order. And yes, mostly I plot these too as linear; the most I broke this approach was at Open Education Conference last year with the videos I had laid out for Amazing Stories of Openness. With the videos sprawled across a CoolIris wall, I could pick any of them out and talk about them or play them.

So here I sit after blasting a lot of whats wrong, yet what do I have to offer as other ways? I am not prepared with exact answers, but this is what I suggest:

• There are more ways to present a talk then a walk through a slide deck.
• We do not give nearly enough preparation to the most important media we use in a talk– our voice (which is why most links to slide decks are worthless- a presentation file is not a presentation
• If we shirk away with, “Oh my voice is not strong” or “I am not creative enough to so anything different”… than we are copping out.
• It is feasible for anyone of us (I can hear you wincing already) to do an effective talk with zero slides.

I am not anti-slides. I am anti-overreliance on slides in our professional communication. As multi-sensory beings, we respond to a variety of inputs; use ‘em all (“yeah right, are you presenting with smell now”?)

Again, I am as guilty as the next one in being a Slidedeckopheliac.

But I am aiming at breaking that habit.

One day.

Maybe I’ll give a talk about it.

Without slides.

I saw Mikhail’s effort of telling the story of The Shining in 6 Frames in response to Jim Groom’s explanation of this as an activity used in his digital storytelling class.

But c’mon, how many other ways do you mix up Jack with an Ax, Jack in the Ice, Jack in the Bar, jack poking his head through the wall, Jack as Woody Allen (oaky, Mikhail, that was clever and rule bending) ? Yawwwwwwwn I was looking for some different angles on the story. Some made up ones.

For me, the Shining was a story about a boy, his toys, and his boundless love for a Dad who gave him more and more toys.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’ve never met Jared Stein I’ve had his blog in my reader a while, see his tweets, and know he swims in same circles as some of my other core online circle.

I’m humbled, Jared- this is beautiful and original. Thanks.