Being There: nets, tweets, avatars
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this May 17th, 2007 8:53 pm
Being There
posted 17 May ‘07, 7.47pm MDT PST on flickr
Title is a nod to colleagues in the audience who are film buffs. Is anyone a fan of Chance the Gardner? www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/
My metaphor may land askew (not the first time), but as a simple person thrust into a strange new world by sheer circumstance, maybe he was foreshadowing web 2.0– and his child like basic perspectives is what so engaged people around him.
In thinking about this session, I kept returning to the value and power of “being there” with all of this exploding technology.
Today was my main presentation for Faculty Academy titled Being There: nets, tweets, avatars… in which I blitzed the audience with 71 slides, mostly flickr’s creative commons licensed images matching my warped metaphors, where I aimed to paint a picture of the distributed and perhaps unfamiliar online social or community space such as twitter, flickr groups for interests you would have never heard of, comment blogging, and a whiff at Second Life.
My suggestion is that ‘expertise’ embodied in a single person is a quasi myth, and the suggested route is to “be” in your own constructed network that provides distributed expertise.
On a larger plane (plain?) I tried to use twitter as an phenomena where people misjudge a technologies attributes and potential based on the seemingly inane content found there. I also tossed in a wild leap at relating teaching to cover bands (What I learned from Johnny Cash), the daring statement that “the internet is really big”, some pointers to resources of online facilitation (that would be you, Choco Nancy!), and a photo of my dog using Second Life. And in the eternal optimism department, I re-used some images to suggest the way through all the craziness is keeping a child like sense of wonder
Anyhow I had fun. People laughed. 75 minutes flew by.
You can find the presentation graphics and links, notes as a flickr set and as a slideshare show (yes I used PowerPoint, mainly for this purpose- not too happy with slideshare- it does not preserve hyperlinks or keep the info in the notes field).
Be there.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
May 17th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Whoa.
Can’t wait for the audio.
May 18th, 2007 at 4:55 am
“the internet is really big” — really?
May 18th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
If only I could have been on I-95 and in University Hall at the same time. Grrr. But I’ve got a custom bootleg, heh heh. Looking forward to spending some quality time with this. You’ve captured something very profound here, Alan. In fact, I think you’ve nailed it.
May 18th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Wow!! Still absorbing, reflecting…but wow!!!!
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:32 am
[...] Faculty Academy presentation “Being There: nets, tweets, avatars” is getting some eyeballs where it is sitting in [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:53 am
[...] Faculty Academy presentation “Being There: nets, tweets, avatars” is getting some eyeballs where it is sitting in [...]
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:12 am
Wow… pretty impressive. I would like to hear more about how you managed the workflow in Flickr…
June 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 pm
It was nothing fancy, Tim. The presentation was done in PowerPoint, the first thought being I could then post it to slideshare– but it seemed flickr offered more to add content in the captions.
So I saved the 70 some slides as JPEGs, uploaded to flickr using the Flickr Uploadr tool, adding just simple titles I then used the organizer to reverse the order (since they came in reverse order).
Then it was a matter of cutting/pasting some of the notes I had from PPT, and adding more, hyperlinks, etc.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Super job, Alan! Is there an .mp3 of the keynote? I’d love to hear what you had to say.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
All presentations from Faculty academy were recorded, in all of their “um” filled glory. Last I heard, they were being fine tuned in post production- keep checking at http://facultyacademy.org/blog07/