That is just plain stupid. WTF is “venti”? “Tall” is “small”? C’mon, speak English will ya? So my new silly travel game is to try and make Starbucks Speak English.

It goes like this. Order your drink, using real descriptive terms, “Small”, “medium”, “Large”. When they respond, “Venti?”, respond with, “no ‘Large’. If you can get them to say the real size, then you win! And we subvert StarbuckSpeak one franchise at a time. So if you are successful, or heck, just of you try, then add a coffee cup pin to this Google Map at http://tinyurl.com/49z88p (if it is set up right, it is open for others to edit)

View Larger Map

Let’s light up the map at establishments where proper human language terms are used. Go out there and use your charms to make ‘em speak in words people understand, not snobspeak.

Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.

Actually it was am enthusiastic crowd and laughed at my silly pictures and anecdotes. I gave them a taste of Levine’s Law (“start with the damn demo’) so I was in Second Life after the 4th slide, showing them a desolate empty place (one that is a standard looking classroom).

I tried to present some viewpoints of skeptics; like gamers who hate the lousy graphics or lack of tasks, the fearful who are not excited after an encounter with a giant Phallus on Orientation Island, etc.

I returned to SL to do some quick site visits- went to the Virtual Hallucinations exhibit from UCDavis, the map collection from David Rumsey, the interactive maps at Daden.

Well I had fun. Here is the slideshare myPlick version of the show, but it lacks the snarky commentary.

You can find links in the presentation and the tour stops at
http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Busy_Second_Life

This is mostly my own doing. I am here for the eLearning Guild 2008 Annual Gathering. I have learned that “eLearning” is an umbrella term for online training, etc in the private sector, things like “corporate virtual universities” etc so it is a different crowd and conference from the typical education ones I have attended.

Maybe its different. Folks here are quite nice, met ones from insurance companies, police departments, and others that work for the eCompanies that create eLearning. I’d say it is noteworthy where there are a number of sessions and products claiming to address the problem of eLearning being “boring”.

I’m here at the invite of Mark Oehlert, whom I have crossed paths online– he has an interesting presentation format called The Great ILS (That Spells Serious Games) Challenge 2.0 (more on that in later post). When i asked the Guild about helping with travel expenses, they asked if I could do 2 more sessions.

Sucker.

That is me.

I bit that hook.., a bit for the curiosity of attending a different conference, but also the location made it reasonable to schedule a pre-conference visit with my Mom in Ft Myers. But oh did I fall behind on my prep, so I was in the hotel all Monday night, Tuesday afternoon/evening doing my prep. I’ve not seen anything outside the hotel lawn (sorry Sis, I did not get out to “see the sights”).

So I dont have a great deal of conference type blogging to do. There’s a lot of technology here, a lot on SCORM, virtual classrooms, XML, screen capture, etc. There’s over arching thread though of a lot of focus on “content”- moving it from one system to another, turning “content” into courses. There’s mention and even sessions on Web 2.0, X or Y generation learners, and even a few mention of social networking (and met some people doing corporate wikis on a scale educators can only dream of), but over all its learning focused on content- lots of paper handouts too. LOTS of powerpoint. LOTS.

So I did attend a session today on “Serious Games for Corporate America” and oh my gosh, I could not take it seriously at all. After talking about using games to appeal to “Gen X”, the first example was a game based on… Jeopardy. This and subsequent examples were all multiple choice “games” that delved only as deep as rote memorization (this company, by the way, charges $40k for a game license, am I in the wrong business again?). Another “game” had a “race car” theme, but was more multiple choice where getting the answer right meant your little car would advance one stop on a track.

I really struggle to call something a serious game that is based on multiple choice.

Did I forget to mention the hangman game?

Was I in some sort of time tunnel? Was this 1994? 1987? Where the **** was I?

I am astonished to even compare these “games” to the open ended Alternate Reality Games I saw at SXSW, at the concepts Henry Jenkins shares about the richness of fan fiction and convergence culture, of the complexity of modern multifaceted storylines people watch in shows like Lost.

I did not see anything serious about trivial games.

Wow, that was one…. strange….. session.

And then a flash- I could navigate around with this camera and collect still frames.. or do a screen capture. and make a movie. I call my first effort “The Streetview(s) of San Francisco” as I took a spin down Lombard Street, the “Crookedest Street in the World”

I did this in about 20 minutes on My MacBookPro.

1. Located Lombard Street on Google Maps with Street View turned on
2. Opened up iShowU, the Mac app for capturing screen action onto QuickTime. Set the capture Area to be right over the street view region
3. Started capture, navigate in street view with arrows- trick turns on those curves!
4. Opene the captured in QuickTime Player- ugh, the microphone caught my clicking and breathing. It needs a sound track! I use the QT tools to delete the sound track Window -> Show Movie Properties; select Sound Track; click Delete.
5. Find a sound track on SkreemR. Searched on “street chase” and found Police Chase from a Brazilian band called Spiritual Robots.
6. Opened the downloaded mp3 file on QuickTime Player. I used the edit controls to select the portion after 1:238 (the duration of my video), and deleted the sound track after 1:28. Did a select all on the audio file. Then went to my movie, and used the Select All to choose the entire movie, and then used Edit -> Add to Selection & Scale which inserts the audio track over the video.
7. Used the File -> export options for Medium-Broadband, and then adjusted the size options to the atypical dimensions (608×320) — I could have done a letterbox effect to make it fit

Those are the mechanics, and there are other ways to capture or put frames into movies. But more than I am wondering, what could one create by using Google Map Street view as a movie camera?

+

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I have documented the hungry actions of the squirrels who raid my bird feeders and again. Fresa, the cutest beagle in the world just gets wild when she spots the squirrel, and gets riles up in chase/hunt mode. As I just got my Canon Powershot back from repair, I was equipped today to get a video of her squealing chase sequence.

Whats even funnier, is hours later, as I play this video and upload to YouTube, every time she hears her own baying sound on the video, she gets wired up again and runs outside to look for squirrel prey.

I am not sure if the squirrels got the message, they keep coming back.

So there is a strand here, some storytelling, and a cliche metaphor to be trotted out. This in many ways a commentary on the work we do in this poorly defined field I’ll call “Instructional Technology”. I think it was triggered by Laura’s post on Fear 2.5: Afterthoughts following the excellent session she and colleagues did at EDUCAUSE ELI 2008. She openly shares her fear:

A fear I have that I don’t think I articulated was a fear of being irrelevant and unnecessary.

How important is my position, really, to the institution as a whole? If my position disappeared, would anyone really notice?

Most of the faculty that reach out to me are really just asking for tech support. They want to know how to perform certain tasks in Blackboard. They want to know how to edit a web site. They don’t tend to ask the bigger questions: what is appropriate technology for me to use to achieve my goals, how should I use x to help my students learn.

So it was hear I started thinking of an old metaphor…

Chicken nuggets, hush puppies creative commons licensed photo image by jumbledpie

and aking myelf, “Are people like Laura stuck creating and serving fish nuggets… rather then in the fish teaching business?”

Kaylen teaches Ian to fish creative commons licensed photo image by dbang

Yes, its an old cliche (and comes equipped with optional funny alternative). I thought I read that it is a variation from Chinese philosopher Kuan-tzu who said “if you give a man a fishing pole he will be able to feed himself for a lifetime” though the popular one (and I took some liberty to not make fishing just a male sport) is lyrical

Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime.

Need an example? Course Management Systems are huge fish nugget factories. And we spend a lot of time, effort, money keeping the assembly lines moving. Fishing? Most things web 2.0.

But that does not really get at the core. What Laura got to in her post (I think) was the frustration of a role where ones skills and talents are seemingly downgraded by The System or not really allowed to flourish due to the needs to keep the nuggets moving. I’ve had a lot of fortune avoiding being on the nugget racket.

I will roll it back a bit via a bit of story. I am nor horrified to be saying things like, “Back when I started…”. This too was triggered by an experience back in February when at the Northern Voice 2008 Conference I shared a hotel room with Jim Groom, that in itself is several riotous stories, but Mr Groom is an amazing source of positive manic energy. For some reason, after late hours of NV partying we’d come back to the hotel and stay up even longer talking movies and web and this weird “field” we are in.

Jim was curious about the old web projects I did at Maricopa (whew they are still there, dont trash ‘em Colen!), so I trotted out a few of them, like Negative Reinforcement University. I described what a unique and special role I had there as an “Instructional Technologist” because at a district, central level of a distributed multi-college system, I was not doing direct how-to software training or supporting Blackboard— it was really a role to do R&D in technology, find ways to get faculty to experiment with them, and to so degree, try to nudge the big ship. I did almost no training workshops.

As he was curious, I trotted out my old job description (which for some bizarre reason he opened his presentation the next day with?), and ironically, I believe it was writing in the 1980s, it still holds up nicely, not that I typically consulted it:

Consults with faculty and staff in developing instructional uses of technologies; researches, analyzes and evaluates new technologies for potential applications in instruction; promotes the implementation of technological innovations; creates demonstrations of instructional applications of technologies; plans, coordinates and conducts special topics workshops in the use of technologies in instruction for faculty, staff or conferences; arranges and schedules new technologies demonstrations and workshops by vendors; provides assistance to faculty, staff and administrators who have instructional technology needs; publicizes and promotes services, resources and activities of the Center.

Yet I got thinking even farther back when I was first hired in 1992- its another long story but I almost blind luck stumbled into the first job at Maricopa as something like “Programmer Analyst/Instructional Systems” whatever that meant. What I had was a bit of teaching experience and using computers in my research a a geology graduate student. I am still not exactly sure why they hired this green kid (29). My boss at the time claimed it was because I wore an earring to the interview.

So the office I walked into, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, had several people working there as “Instructional Designers” — and I admit I had never heard of such a thing (I was coming out of a dead end career as a professional graduate student in the sciences). “Instructional Designers”? it sounded so… so… industrial, like there is a huge factory out there stamping out .. learning nuggets. They all had PhDs and had spent years memorizing learning style inventories and theories of meta-cognition (I guess, and I am saying this totally tongue in cheek- I have a lot of respect for people who focus on the question of “how we learn”).

And I was a lowly technologist– “just a technologist”. One ID in particular I worked with was pretty clear with her disdain, and to her the great goal of her work was to create paper “job aids”

WTF was that? he uttered it like I was an idiot not to know what the hell a “job aid” was.

My sarcastic mind muttered something about a hand being involved, but I kept my head down, as the politics of the office were not important nor was I invsted in battling this b****.

Yet I would get lots of “designs” that were lavishly formatted documents in well tabbed notebooks that were all well structured, with clearly labeled Objectives and Closing Question Checking Said Objectives, it was exciting as reading the ingredients of a cereal box. So I would nibble around the edges like, “We want them to go to this path first, but rather than make it the only option, what if the other options are presented, but there is a puzzle that requires the desired path to solve?” I looked to ditch the cheesy clip art and add real photos.

And at the same time I was mesmerized by these new tools I was discovering daily (the Stanford Info-Mac FTP site was gold sumex-aim yeah!). I was reaching myself to fish with HyperCard, Director, by building, creating, tinkering, and tapping into the fishing communities– email listservs, Gopher. I discovered this joy of creating something from nothing, of getting ideas or code from others.

I had some lucky breaks, stumbled early into the web, and found a way to connect with faculty I worked with by avoiding jargon. My boss and I tried to re-write my job description, and each effort, the Big HR machine would bat it back to the same level I was at. So giving up, I got appointed to the Instructional Technologist position, which apparently was written for one person in the 1980s (Thanks Jim for blazing the path, same guy who handed my a floppy disc in 1993 labeled “Mosaic”).

And at tat level I was more responsible for running projects, working with admins, coordination all of our Ocotillo programs. Oh planning that first large retreat gave my stomach fits.

The thing I loved most about this position was I had tremendous latitude to explore and try new technologies (I am fairly sure no one knew what the heck I was doing), and not only look for fishing opportunities, but looking for different bodies of water to fish in.

Interestingly enough in 2005, I was part of a group working with EDUCAUSE who ran a first Instructional Technologist development program at Penn State University. Oh mu god what hell we put those poor people through! It was way over stuffed, designed by committee. It was there I met Vidya from Trinity University. The point was to better develop these position as leadership ones.

So I wandered down my own story path, just blabbing about the stuff I did. The point is…. well, a I look around, read, what many of my colleagues do– it sure seems like a lot of nugget production. Do we foster an environment of “learned helplessness” among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft? I’ve heard recently professionals mutter things like “Oh I can never learn to edit wikis correctly” You have to try really hard to break a wiki.

And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian’s face contort when someone says, “how do I use twitter in my class?” He’d say in his sweet flip matter, “I am not going to answer that” — not because he doesn’t want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don’t find a freaking “job aid” that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class– you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense. The great modelers I see, like Barbara Ganley, Gardner Campbell- dont rely on their tech staff to give them a recipe, they bring in their domain of knowing what they want to teach, they tinker with the fishing rods and bait, and they create a use of the tool based on a hunch, an idea rooted in their areas of interest.

So you ought to ask, “Hey Mr Complainer, how do you move from being a nugget dispenser to being a fishing coach?”

Good question!

I am so glad you asked that question!

(this are the diversions people do w/o wanting to answer).

Most likely many people are in a position that is traditionally producing nuggets. So it will take some time, perseverance, luck, creativity. My thought is you do a lot of small things. You dont try to blow everyone’s hair back with Web 2.0, but go for something small that can have a quick payoff. And its not that you cannot help people learn how to use the tools, but just enough to get started. help them learn the other ways to tap into knowledge (googling, tagging in del.icio.us, being public about knot knowing how to do something and just asking for it). Toss ‘em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize.

it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.

Heck nuggets can be better with a good sprinkling of hot sauce!

I am not pretending to have the answers here, but am eager to know if I am just ranting, stuck on a metaphor, or what?

So would you rather be teaching fishing or tossing nuggets?

Now that I am living in Strawberry Arizona, a small town in the middle of a National Forest, at 6000 feet elevation, a number of environment differences are obvious. First, form where I lived before in Scottsdale, the city has a progressive recycling program- paper, cans, bottles, plastic go in a big giant can, it disappears, and we assume it is all recycled. That story is another blog post.

But in a small town, recycling, transporting, etc is likely cost prohibitive. There is a collection for aluminum can at the fire station, and WalMart in Payson takes paper can cardboard. How I hate now tossing glass and soup cans in the trash! And most of my paper has been used for starting fires in the wood stove.

And heat is an issue, cause it gets damn cold; well below freezing December through end of February, and even through May, can get to or below freezing. I have propane heat provided as a utility (flows out of a pipe form somewhere), but propane prices have gone through the roof- the paper from Payson has stories of people closing rooms, lowering the thermostat to 60, and still paying $500/month. The place I am in now is small (less than 900 square feet) so it heat up well, but I’ve been trying to do most of my heat from burning firewood in the wood stove (another issue not mentioned is the effect of smoke on the ozone, or consuming natural resources).

The wood goes fast when you are here all the time, and I can say there is some exercise value to splitting wood and moving if from the pile to the storage area below the deck to the rack on the deck to inside. I’ve taken a few medium/small trees down (one too close to the house or ones the weather got to) so its nice to use my own wood.

A few weeks back I bought from Alex a cord of wood (good lord what a weird unit- “One cord is defined as 128 cubic feet (3.62 m³), corresponding to a woodpile 4 feet wide × 4 feet high × 8 feet long.”) which is really a pile from the back of a truck. When Alex was here he was eying a big oak off the corner of the houe, right between that and my shed. It was maybe 35 or 40 feet high, with branches over the house, and wa honestly of not much use, especially if I ever considered adding a room or a real garage.

Plus, a he told me, the tree was top heavy. These are either Arizona White Oak or Emory Oak (I tried to find the difference, but am not a botany dude and it really does not matter to me). Alex told me the centers of these tree tend to stay soft and absorb water like a sponge for times of lean water. Smart species find a way to adapt to arid conditions. Anyhow, this tree had a huge open hole on one side, so the sun shined in there and dried out most of the bottom of the tree, which was then largely hollow, while the top was still solid and heavy. So the whole tree was top heavy, and possible in danger of falling.

It was a much bigger job than my chainsaw and skills could manage, so I hired Alex to take it down and leave me the wood. He said something about an extra $25 to haul the crown and smaller limbs to the dump, but I said, “woah” I can find a way to use it all. Let’s not add stuff to the dump I can put to use.

So this is how I used an entire oak tree (or will use).

First of all I got a lot of solid oak firewood. Maybe a 1/4 of a cord was dry enough to split and use right away, and I have another 1/2 cord of giant pieces that need to dry out a year. In the stove it burns long.

Next, look at this stump:

There is no scale, but its about 30 inches across. Inside of it was a lot of soft pulp and chip that was great additive for my compost pile, so I scooped it out. I’m thinking when I plant in May or June, I can fill it with soil and have a nice little flower bed.

Next, I had a huge pile of medium sized branches, limbs with leaves from the crown, that stretched in a pile across the driveway. It at there a few weeks as I was traveling and did not have time to deal with it.

This is almost the last bit- I did not get a picture of it all, but it was 4 or 5 times as much as you see here. So the job was clipping off the medium sized branches, and stripping the leaves in to bin, and breaking up the medium and small limbs and filling bins. I use these as kindling to start fires on my wood stove.

Its very tedious, stripping leaves with work gloves, snapping the bare limbs into bite sized pieces.

And I ended up with about 6 bins full of kindling.

There are medium sized limbs that can be clipped with pruners

And there are large limbs, some pretty solid, that will need some chainsaw action to cut into pieces small enough to use in the firewood pile:

All of the leaves and twigs stripped from the branches go into the compost/mulch pile where the garden will be, so that will get recycled as I start turning dirt in a few weeks

So I am using the entire tree- am I actually engaged in permaculture? I dunno, but there is a lot of satisfaction in (a) a few days of physical labor (“real work” not this computer crap); and (b) re-using everything in some new manner.

Not that I want to do this kind of work every day ;-)

So that is the story of a big tree I have been working on, disassembling, and redistributing…

And this is also a year when I am trying a few conferences out of the normal education technology realm, so I was wanting to be more reflective and… okay, I am lazy.

The idea of doing detailed sessions posts was not all attractive; earlier in my blogging I would try and do session blogging, but am not enthralled at being a stenographer. Second, I decided on a new tech strategy- I left the laptop in the hotel, and “lugged” (meaning slipped it in a pocket), my new iPod Touch. The hangup there was the wireless network at the Austin Convention Center got bogged down, so even a quick tweet was a long affair.

So first impressions- the size and scale of SXSW is immense to say the least and makes one dizzy. It filled the entire Austin Convention Center, which must be itself a few city blocks (except for one bridal expo which must have caused some interesting cross conference hybrids). The keynotes in the main ballrooms must have had 1000+. Even the “smaller” sessions had audiences of like 100. The printed program weighs a good 3 pounds or so.

Some small things I liked was after registering you could go to another room and pick up your giant bag full of crap and the program, or as recommended to me by (?Christie I met in line?) you could pick up just the program and get the bag later; which I did on the last day.

There are a smattering of education folks here, but nicely a niche group. There are way more advertisers, media companies, start ups, software firms, artists, social activists, blog nuts, people who use the word “monetize” often, game players and makers, graphic artists, others under the web2.0 umbrella…

If I were granted some SXSW god-powers, I would outlaw the shameless self promoting people do when they hog the mike for a question.. “Hi, I’m Alan with Online Pickles.com and I blog at HowIWillSavetheEarth, and my new book on Filched Design is open for autographs at 3pm… so my question is really about me but…” How lame is that? How transparent?

SXSW has a civilized morning schedule- sessions started at 10:00am… well civilized only if you don’t fill the evenings with the string of parties, those alone are like a second part of the program. Austin is… well, a place that lends itself to late night antics. As I was here primarily for some NMC meetings later in the week, I was at a hotel far from the action, and those $35 cab rides got dull.

So forget trying to “take it all in” and just try and make some good guesses. They had video cameras in just about every session and one hopes eventually a lot of that goes online. Sessions where great (see below), but unlike a lot of the edu cons, the activities that hum are not so focused on the sessions- there is the hall talks, the expo, the book readings, the game play, the music, the parties, the long lunch breaks– all of this affords the chances to randomly meet someone, which might be Jeff Bezos or Herbie the Storm Trooper. I found a lot of people really approachable with a simple “Hi, I’m Alan…”

Also an interesting observation was above the now not so unusual live conference twittering, was the proliferation of people doing live video streaming from mobile phones, using tools like Qik — in the keynotes, there were usually 2 or 3 hands held up the entire session with a Nokia video phone in hand. If I were to create a gizmo to get rich, it would be some sort of head band rig to hold the camera so the arm and hand dont need to do all that work.

For some session highlights, I had blogged the first session I saw on “Filching Design: When the Shoe Fits” where apparently some twitters thought was not the verb I heard. It was a great mix of panelists on the concept of “borrowing” (e.g. filching) design or code- it was rather lively as they had the audience play “filch or fair”. Next, I was half listening to “The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007″ which lambasted some of the lamest/worst efforts of companies trying to do “cool” new media. The room was packed, I was sitting on the floor and could see 80% of the screen, not the panel. Again, it was fast paced, with lots of voices, not the typical educon PowerPoint droning. My come away from that was, what kind of “ad agency” experts suggest strategies of underestimating their audiences ability to use the net to peel away their fakery.

The keynotes are again at a reasonable spot in the schedule, 2:00 PM, most people can wake up by that time, eh? On Saturday, the open remarks featured Steven Johnson (“Everything Bad is Good For You”) and Henry Jenkins (MIT). No slides at all, just Steve and Henry sitting in chairs, quasi conversational. Henry clearly was a bit more in the spotlight, almost like he was the interviewee, but he was spot on in passion, examples, and candor. I’ve heard him speak several time over the years, and hes always got a different angle, even on the same topics. Oh I did manage to blog this session too, I forgot already.

A memorable part was when Johnson noted that a few years ago, TV was looking like a dying media, yet in 2008 we are seeing emergences of higher forms in shows such as “Lost” and “The Wired” (he called it “Hill Street Blues on Steroids”) and then asked Jenkins to say which one he liked best! So he did the right thing and asked the audience to vote (hard to measure, it was close) and then in Solomon like wisdom did not split the baby, “The Wired is best show ‘in the box’; Lost is best show outside of the box (all of the web tangents, online work such as LostPedia, as a transmedia extension)”

In the afternoon, I sat in on “Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs” – hoping for inspiration for my long term dream of designing an educational Alternate Reality Game. That too got blogged already mainly as I found I made some great contacts by getting up to the mike and asking a question. I got some good comments there by one of the panelists, Dee, who was part of World Without Oil, and had great conversations with a few others afterwards.

After the big session, I met up with a group of people I had only met in Second Life, so we got to see what our Real Life avatars were like, meeting Jeremy Koester, Joe Sanchez, James Morgan, and two others I am forgetting, sorry.

We opted to get out of the center and head to Freebirds World Burritos for some good giant burros (and free wifi, I had to pop into SL to help run a session). Then, we walked past a line that wrapped around a block for the Google party, and in lieu had some beers at an Irish joint on 6th street. I had to bail early for a commitment, so I missed the Saturday party scene…

That was one day. There were more…

First up for me on Sunday was “Making it So: Learning from SciFi Interfaces” (which unfortunately was opposite another cleverly titled one on “Everything I Know About Accessibility I Learned From Star Wars”) — which was a fascinating look at the types of interfaces in scifi movies going way back and how these influence modern software/web/media design. There was a 3D map type thing in an XMen movie tat directly influenced an engineer to create a real dynamic terrain modeler based on the same type of display. Or that that the Star Trek communicator was a long lead in to the first Star-Tac flip phone. As the presenters suggested that SciFi movies set in our minds deep seated expectations for later interfaces (e.g. the screens from Minority Report?).

What I liked about the session, beyond the mind opening concept, a snazzy presentation tool (I thought one of them said it was built in Director), lots of video clips, was that one presenter was Nathan Shedroff who’ early early web work on Experience Design and the Unified Theory of Design was a huge influence on me in the early web days (mid 1990s). You can download a PDF of the SXSW presentation.

Not being all keen to slobber over facebook, I opted to skip the Mark Zuckerberg keynote, which apparently became the fiasco event of the conference with some over zealous ego headed interviewer. Videos are all over the net — lesson for those going on stage- you shall be YouTubed. I saw instead some tired session “Logos: Why They’re Irrelevant and Can Actually Hurt Your Business” where graphic artists were arguing the merits or non merits of graphic logos for companies. It bordered on academic quibbling.

In between was an interesting demo of the guys doing bloxes simple cardboard cutouts that were folded into cubes which in turn locked together like legos to make art-like pieces. Got a free t-shirt, woot. Innovative concept!

And then the big highlight was the session by Kathy Sierra on “Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users” – her blog is sorely missed after last years bizarre string of personal attacks. Wow, she is a super dynamic speaker, with lots of oomph (wanting us all to help our users “kick ass”) a little YouTube sample — see the more detailed notes at http://blog.brian-fitzgerald.net/?p=159. And she closed by wanting to introduce someone who really did it all- Gary Vaynerchuk of http://winelibrary.com (see video of this segment).

What a powerful session!

The first thing I got to on Monday was the panel session on “True Stories from Social Media Sites” which was “moderated” in a seriously over-the-top fashion by Guy Kawaski who just kept it all going in a fun and lively pace. Also refreshing was that the panel he assembled as almost all women who had either started social media sites or been uber active/successful in them. I was most eager to see and meet Rashmi, co-founder of Slideshare as she had several times responded directly to some suggestions I made on their site (alas, I was late for a lunch meet up, so I missed her, but sent an email, and got a nice reply).

The rain was coming down hard, but the folks from Zappos.com were smart in giving our rain ponchos. A largish bunch including Hilary Mason, Rachel Smith, Henry Segerman, Joe Sanchez, and a bunch more ventured out for lunch at that nifty..um south american place I cannot recall the name of.

We got back in time to catch the 2:00 PM keynote from Frank Warren on the fascinating PostSecret project which combined old and new media forms. Frank solicited, passed out postcards to strangers and asked them to send it to the self addressed address and share a secret they had never told anyone. He has gotten thousands of these, and people have shared the entire range of human experience, from quirky humor, to deep painful sadness, to revenge, to thankfullness, to anger, to pleasure, to revenge… and he has posted many on his blog and also in a published book.

Stories, real ones, in postcard form, were just fantastic human expressions. Sorry Miguel H for maybe getting in trouble for following the link after I tweeted… he reported seeing “inappropriate images” that was more like “50 Ways to Get Me Fired” (clever guy). I was probably snarky when I tweeted back, “Dont Look”. But look past the visual titillations to see the depth of story here, my friends.

I love the concept.

After that was a break to roam the exhibits, which had great stuff! I met the guys behind Animoto (and thanked them profusely), the top dude at utream.tv, istockPhoto, creative commons (stickers and t-shirts!). I was snarky at the Google booth, “So what is it you guys do?”.

And then it was great to bump into my Vancouver friends from Raincity.com I had seen recently at Northern Voice- Kris, Roland and Dave- and got a early invite for their Monday night party. Kris got a photo of us with his giant 1000 pound uber camera and I got a pretty good one with my nearly busted PowerShot. Of course, he was busy the rest of the week hanging our with rock stars (see his amazing photos) but is always very gracious in person.

At 5:00 PM I had to show up to see Beth Kanter’s part in the “Pimp My Non Profit – Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology” and wow, she is a rock start among the non-profit crowd- must have been 150 in the room. The panel had lots of energy, all decked out with their furry hats and big fake gold chains.

Beth and I have been crossing internet paths for years, and we finally got to meet in person, yay! We got to have lunch on Tuesday.

So it was off to a fabulous special dinner and then back downtown for the Raincity party “South by Northwest”. Those tickets did not get us to the front of the line, but we got in early enough to get a spot on the top floor. Wow, was that place rocking! And woot, those guys paid for everyone’s drinks… late late night blurrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Okay, long blog post. Cannot recall what I did Tuesday morning– mostly met and chatted with folks. The real, real highlight (beside lunch with Beth!) was the keynote by Jane McGonigal on “a game designers perspective on the future of happiness”– she started with a bit on how she was researching “happiness” and proposed rather convincingly that “multiplayer games are the ultimate happiness engine”"

Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.

She has pretty much blogged her talk better than anyone else could including her presentation on slideshare. Especially intriguing was were concept of “How alternate reality games amplify human happiness” with properties she outlined as

• mobbability
• open authorship
• influency
• emergensight
• ping quotient
• longbroading
• multi-capitalism
• protovation
• signal/noise management
• cooperation radar

Her energy was contagious, not over the top, but vibrant, and her message was moving- “Games can change the world”.

And she closed by doing the Soulja Boy dance.

And with that high point of the conference, I cannot blog much more.

There was much more to this experience, take this as some highlights, but I had a super uber mega time at SXSW.

So it was exciting this year when Al put out a call via twitter for educators around the world to be “coaches” for this year’s miniLegends, asking people to adopt one students and agree to provide regular comments/feedback. Besides signing up myself, I echoed the call and a bunch of folks, particularly my colleagues here in Arizona, stepped right up.

Al had written before how he had taught students how to be safe online and how he had gotten written permission from parents of all the kids. Let me repeat this- the parents supported this program.

And like many people who had followed this, I am utterly crushed that that the local government is the Bigger Mommy, has superseded the parental decision and ordered Al to close his entire site (not only this years project but previous ones- strangely enough the Internet Archive lacks most of Al’s blog history. hmmmmm).

This blog has been disabled in compliance with DECS wishes (Department of Education and Children’s Services – South Australia)

It seems that this blog in particular is being investigated regarding risk and management issues. What procedures should be taken for the use/non-use of blogs to enhance student learning will be considered.

Since his project was hosted on edublogs.org, we can only guess Big Mommy came down hard on Al.

I am willing to consider that from outside, I may not have all of the local context and concern. Would it help to have had a background check? Perhaps the DECS has documented a verifiable risk (as opposed to a presumed/assumed one). Maybe it would have been less “risky” without using the students photos (they were identified by first name only).

But they way I see it, the regional government is over-riding parental decisions, and is being the Bigger Mommy. Is that the future, the model we wish these 8 and 9 year olds to learn from? And the work that Al had done previously was a model used, referenced by educators around the world, who will no longer have access to the work.

So Al is racking up a huge number of supportive comments on his closed blog. Is that enough? And most of all, what have these students learned from this experience?