CogBlogged from ‘November, 2006’

My wife and I have been taking a class together… nothing formal, but our city of Scottsdale offers a City Government 101 class, which meets every other week where you get to learn about a different department. It’s been everything from finance to water resources to trash to libraries to police/fire… one of the highlights was a visit to the traffic control center where a huge screen allows staff to monitor and adjust the traffic lights across the entire city… and live demos from the police K9 unit… and also, our library which offers a lot of services, many of them now online such as their databases, including something soon that will allow e-check out of audio and video files for use on portable devices. A city can be a much more complex entity that one gives it credit for, taking a lot of what is offered for granted… Scottsdale [...]

Too much time is slipping following last week’s NMC Regional Conference in San Antonio, and BackBloggiing is slipping dangerously into “Fuggeddaaboudit”… but I would be seriously remiss without mentioning the dynamic back to back sessions by two of my all time favorite presenters- Bryan Alexander, followed by Brian Lamb- the Br[yi]an Double Header. Bryan is talking so fast, he is a blur. First up was Bryan’s firehose on Web 2.0: The Next Wave of Collaboration, Publication, and Storytelling, which, in 2.0 fashion, he posted on slideshare (wow, there were 108 slides, and we may have seen most of them!?): http://slideshare.net/BryanAlexander/nmc-2006-regional After setting a context from 18th century encyclopedias, he made a curious, now meaningful comparison between Web 2.0 and gaming, not in their characteristics, but how we react to them: Awareness is difficult… * Huge, financially and quantitatively successful worlds * Global and rapidly developing * Bad anxieties, policies, and [...]

For quite some time, I’ve interacted via blogs et al with Gardner Campbell, but today was the first time I’ve heard him present… and there he is a virtuoso. At the NMC Regional Conference, his session was on “The Allegory Efffect: Metaphoric Immersion in Croquet and Second Life”, where he put a nice connection between learning theory, literature, and the strange space of virtual worlds. We will soon have a copy of Gardner’s powerpoint posted to the conference presentation collection, and below you will find a 50 minute segment of audio from his session (I was late to start recording): http://media.nmc.org/2006/11/allegory-effect.mp3 [14.6 Mb MP3, 51:04] Gardner set a great model of presentation by first offering an open wiki for backchannel… and demonstrated his teaching approach by having volunteers from the audience read aloud some of the literature quotes he tied to his main points. Maybe this is small, but by [...]

flickr foto Town Hall on Future of Scholarshipavailable on flickr Visual facilitation by Rachel Smith, NMC. NMC 2006 Regional Conference hosted by Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas The Thursday morning special event at the NMC 2006 Regional Conference was a town hall meeting- “The Future of Scholarship: A Visual Conversation”. This theme was one of the three tracks of the conference, and a more strongly growing area of NMC interest following our October online conference: How is the nature of scholarship changing? Emerging media and tools offer opportunities for all areas of scholarship to diverge from traditional forms. What are the possibilities for research, publish, and project development? We had a great deal of response and participation from the audience. This session was faciliated and captured by the amazing talent my my NMC colleague Rachel Smith, who generated 3 large sheets of ideas, connections, etc. This content will be summarized, [...]

flickr foto Welcome Reception – Flickr Demoavailable on flickr NMC Regional Conference, San Antonio Texas At the Wednesday opening reception for the NMC 2006 regional conference, we not only had great food and drink, but 8 different demos related to “What the 2.0 Are We Talking About? New Web Demos”, where colleagues I arm twisted gave informal hands on demos to anyone who wandered by. It was rather energetic the whole time, and thanks go to: 2.0 of Flickr by Tom Hapgood, University of Arkansas) 2.0 of Geotagging by Cyprien Lomas, University of British Columbia 2.0 of del.icio.us by Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia 2.0 of Web Video by Shelley Rodrigo, Mesa Community College 2.0 of Google Docs by Michael Roy, Wesleyan University / Academic Commons 2.0 of Odeo by Gardner Campbell, University of Richmond 2.0 of Gliffy by Bryan Alexander, NITLE 2.0 of Vyew – by Alan Levine, [...]

Later in the afternoon for the first day of the NMC 2006 Regional Conference, Tom Hapgood and I presented on our preliminary work on the “new” web face of the NMC. And yes, for a rare treat, I did use PowerPoint, though it was all creative commons flickr photos and links. As is, you can find the presentation on Slideshare: As one of the shortcomings now of Slideshare is that it does not provide the URLs or hyperlinks, so I tossed the pile of links into a wiki page. So we started off with my claim that I did not really want to present and yammer on and on, so we opened a blank wiki and asked participants to toss out their favorite “2.0″ characteristics. It was not an exhaustive list, but it set the stage. We ran through soe of the usual suspects of web 2.0 sites… there was [...]

Here is a beginning of backblogs form the NMC Regional Conference last week. Of course, you may say I may be raving since I work for NMC, but this was a fab conference, with a small enough number of people there that you could converse with all of them over the 2 days of sessions. The program was outstanding! On day 1, Ed Lamoureux, barely making it to San Antonio after bad weather in Illinois, shared his experiences in planning a 3 week course at Bradley University he will teach in January 2006. Ed dove head first into Second Life, but not without a great deal of fore thought, in dealing with a complex set of issues to prepare his students to now only hold all of their classes in Second Life, but to also engage in social research within the environment. Ed has gotten a lot of great press [...]

I’m ensconced in the Phoenix Airport (again, love the free wifi, thanks y’all!) waiting for the Southwest cattle call for the flight to San Antonio, where later this week is the NMC Regional Conference. The theme is “New Challenges … New Ideas” with tracks on The Future of Scholarship, Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality, and Embracing the New Web. Speaking of the latter, we are setting out again a request for flickr photos, blogposts, and del.icio.us bookmarks related to this conference be tagged with the “official” tag (I made it official) of nmc2006reg. We did this tagging last summer for the conference in Cleveland with fair results. Follow the tag this conference page for highlights from this week’s fete. There’s not much now- I had no photos of San Antonio, so hodgepodged some other photos from Texas or one of a cowboy hat. I’d be curious sometime to look [...]