CogBlogged from ‘January, 2007’

I’ve already blogged a summary of our NMC Second Life presentation over at the Campus Observer, so in this lazy state, I am reblogging myself (hey, that ping kind of tickles!). The picture below is what we did to give the Second Life participants a snapshot of what the Real Life participants in Atlanta were doing (hey in both worlds, they were sitting in chairs!)– but unlike the assertions of some naysayers, both audiences were rather verbal and engaged. All in all, given the multiple media inputs, outputs, etc it went amazingly well. Nary a bullet, word slide, or the essence of powerpoint was seen. The summary includes the recording of the audio.

Our second half of an NMC double-header presentation at the ELI 2007 Annual Conference in Atlanta was the official release of the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. This is the 4th year of NMC’s report on emerging technologies for teaching, learning, and creative expression, and my biased opinion (2 years on the advisory board and now part of the team that produces it) is that it again sets the mark high for a practical look at new technologies. And high it was. We were told to expect an audience of perhaps 60, so we prepped 100 handouts, but the room overflowed, people were taking the floor seats and extra chairs brought into the back. We were told later the fire marshall had capped the attendance at 175! So, in NMC fashion we had to do somethings fun, different, and interactive for this presentation (one of many reasons I joined NMC). In [...]

Alexander‘s laws of Hotels is upheld- the bigger, the more expensive the hotel, the more troublesome and weak is the internet connectivity. Ditto for the CNN Omni. It seems as though they throttle upload speeds to selected sites- I ftp-ed a 25 Mb audio file in 2.5 minutes, but uploads to flickr get to 68k and stop dead. I can post to our NMC WordPress sites, yet going to a WordPress site hosted here n Dreamhost never completes the post. What kind of network throttles uploads? It’s the same in my room as in the lobby. I’ve gone downstairs to the EDUCAUSE conference wireless, which works fine.

Office Panoavailable on flickr For Ewan who asked politely for this…. This is a stitched panorama of my office dine in a pile of haste before leaving town for a cross country trip. I did a quick series of overlapping photos, and not even done nicely pivoted form a good central point, put turning from left to right. I then used the amazing Autostitch tool, one that automatically takes a series of sloppy pano shots like these and ties them nicely together. It’s a windows only program, but I ran it on my Mac in Parallels during the plane flight from Phoenix to Atlanta, and then did a bit of the warp filter in photoshop to try and even out the vertical lines. This room is actually about 12 feet square, and my back is to the closet door. The flickr version of this has lots of notes attached to [...]

This is a second casted blog post– the first nicely composed, well crafted, punctually perfect one gotten eaten as the wireless network of this hotel decided it did not want to post. It’s not letting up upload photos to flickr, and I left it on “publish” when I hit the sack at 3:00 AM. Okay, backtrack to yesterday. It was raining when our flight left Phoenix (60 minutes late) and raining when we landed in Atlanta (90 minutes late), so it must by one massive cross country downpour. Arrived to a relatively downtown area at the CNN center, the center of something. Met up with my co-presenter Heid to rehearse, and then got to the priority, catching up with colleagues in the bar for food, drink, and conversation (in reverse order?)…. It was after 1:00 Am when I got upstairs. Waiting were a few emails letting me now some of [...]

Crank up the Indy Junior map, I’m on the way for a 3 legged trip this week; today from Phoenix to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual conference, one of my recent favorite events to attend for the caliber of folks who go, quality of program, etc. Sadly, due to the scheduling gods/demons, I get to attend one day and a morning, as I need to get to Dallas Tuesday to plan for another NMC Marcus Project workshop, 3 days of introducing Texas art museums to digital storytelling concepts, digital photography, video, and audio production basics, and putting this together in Pachyderm. Weather havoc seems to be sweeping the nation, show it should be a ride. Today was intense rain in Phoenix, throwing all kinds of monkey wrenches into tourists plans for the sunny desert. Yes, it’s an outbreak of weather, something that happens maybe 40-50 times a year here. [...]

This has nothing to do with new year resolves to live more organized (if that were the case I might be making lists and crossing things off), but I’ve been pleased to de-clutterize my home office, and, at the same time, make it easier to hook more gizmos to my laptop. First was getting a new USB/Firewire combo-hub and getting alot of the cable snakes tucked away behind the desk. The new is almost full, but makes it easier to work with the single Firewire and 2 USB ports on my MacBookPro… I was already running into issues digitizing video needing the firewire ports on the camera and my external drive. But since I seem to have a working solution to running Windows on the Intel mac, I no longer need the really old Compaq laptop I had been using to test web sites. This was actually my wife’s old [...]

Today there was a glut of comments in my Google Reader subscription for What Can You Do With flickr? part of the session I did in October for the K12 Online Conference, so being always in need of some ego brushes, it was pretty cool to get a long string of them — did someone do a workshop or something, referring to it? IN reading them, I found something else had happened– I was getting my 15 picoseconds of web fame! This flickr photo had been spotted in the popular regions of del.icio.us: with something like 200 taggings recorded. But why now? Ahhh, for the first time, I got a serious Digg. I was Dugg. Been Dugged. How cool: But oh, that crowd who comment in Digg is nasty! They hold no punches, not a very friendly scene. just what I was thinking, what’s the point of posting this? If [...]

Hang on to your full content news feeds, this post might be a long one. I hope to try and document the under the hood as well as some of the exterior chrome work on a new site NMC just unveiled this week. This is as much for my records as anything. But first, start with the demo, the final piece. The new site is for NMC Virtual Worlds, our new arm that provides consulting and buolding expertise in Virtual Worlds, right now focused n (but not forever) Second Life. Take a peek first at http://virtualworlds.nmc.org/ which looks almost like: if you reload the front page, the banners as well as the case study in the lower right will change. The banner rotation is easy, something I’ve already put into the other WP power site, the NMC Campus Observer. The needs for the site were provided rather simply as a [...]

My infatuation with Microsoft Windows is documented, and may not have changed much, but I can say I am liking very much so far the flexibility, and slick connectedness of Parallels Desktop for Mac running on my MacBookPro. This morning I gave Bootcamp the boot. Goodbye. Go back to basic training, as the new solider has you beat. Parallels makes it easy to get going with a Windows XP virtual machine; from the Parallels interface you enter your Windows XP activation key, and it pretty much zips you past the basic XP start up steps (well not so fast, can anything move more slower and inspire less software awe than the slow peeling of DOS blue screens as the Windows installer sets up?). Well, there as one detour. It seems I have had to re-install Windows XP so many times, I wore out my activation key, so I called a [...]